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Evidence of psychological distress in families during COVID‐19 outbreak are arising. However, the perceived changes in psychological adjustment during home confinement with respect to the period before the pandemic have not been addressed yet. Moreover, little is known about the role of coparenting and specific COVID‐19 contextual variables on parental stress and children's behavioral difficulties in the Italian context. Using a cross‐sectional survey, we collected data on 841 Italian parents of children aged 3–11 years with typical development during the home confinement (20th April–18th May). We analyzed levels of parental stress, coparenting, and child externalizing behaviors before and during the home confinement. Additionally, hierarchical regressions were performed to investigate predictors of parental stress and child externalizing behaviors during the lockdown. Results showed that parental stress (especially in mothers) and child externalizing behaviors increased during the lockdown period. Coparenting was a strong predictor of parental stress, together with being a mother, younger child age, less time dedicated to the child, and scarce feasibility of remote working. Besides, child externalizing behaviors were predicted by male gender, less parental time dedicated to the child, higher parental stress, and child distance learning workload. Our findings indicate a negative impact of COVID‐19 lockdown in both parents and children, suggesting that positive coparenting and time dedicated to children may help to reduce the detrimental effect of pandemic restrictions on family adjustment.

The human infant face represents an essential source of communicative signals on the basis of which adults modulate their interactions with infants. Behavioral studies demonstrate that infants faces activate sensitive and attuned responses in adults through their gaze, face expression, voice, and gesture. In this study we aimed to identify brain responses that underlie adults’ general propensity to respond to infant faces. We recorded fMRI during adults’ (non-parents) processing of unfamiliar infant faces compared to carefully matched adult faces and infrahuman mammal infant and adult faces. Human infant faces activated several brain systems including the lateral premotor cortex, supplementary motor area, cingulate cortex, anterior insula and the thalamus. Activation of these brain circuits suggests adults’ preparation for communicative behavior with infants as well as attachment and caregiving. The same brain regions preferentially responded to human infant faces when compared to animal infant faces, indicating species-specific adult brain responses. Moreover, results of support vector machine based classification analysis indicated that these regions allowed above chance-level prediction of brain state during perception of human infant faces. The complex of brain responses to human infant faces appear to include biological mechanisms that underlie responsiveness and a caring inclination toward young children which appear to transcend adult’s biological relationship to the baby.

Human infants' complete dependence on adult caregiving suggests that mechanisms associated with adult responsiveness to infant cues might be deeply embedded in the brain. Behavioural and neuroimaging research has produced converging evidence for adults' positive disposition to infant cues, but these studies have not investigated directly the valence of adults' reactions, how they are moderated by biological and social factors, and if they relate to child caregiving. This study examines implicit affective responses of 90 adults toward faces of human and non-human (cats and dogs) infants and adults. Implicit reactions were assessed with Single Category Implicit Association Tests, and reports of childrearing behaviours were assessed by the Parental Style Questionnaire. The results showed that human infant faces represent highly biologically relevant stimuli that capture attention and are implicitly associated with positive emotions. This reaction holds independent of gender and parenthood status and is associated with ideal parenting behaviors.

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