Parenting stress and risk of child maltreatment during the COVID-19 pandemic: A family stress theory-informed perspective

Abstract

The risk of child maltreatment is heightened during the pandemic due to multiple COVID-19 related stressors, such as physical and mental health concerns, economic stress, challenges in homeschooling, marital conflicts and intimate personal violence, and intensified child–parent relationships. Both parental internal (e.g., parenting styles) and external resources (e.g., social support), and parental perceptions toward stressors will affect how parents cope with these stressors, which may exacerbate or mitigate the risk of child maltreatment. Guided by family stress theory, this article identifies COVID-19 related stressors at the family level, and further elaborates on how these stressors are associated with child maltreatment via parents’ resources, perceptions, and coping strategies. Implications for future practice and research are discussed.

Staying at Home Is a Privilege: Evidence from Fine-Grained Mobile Phone Location Data in the United States during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Remote learning challenges and childcare duties forced parents to spend more time at home, which is a reasonable interpretation of our findings. Evidence shows that many parents spent a large amount of time with their child(ren) while schools were closed, and many of them were struggling with balancing their employment demands and child care (Garbe et al 2020;Wu and Xu 2020;Craig and Churchill 2021). It should also be noted that school closures could be a driver of increased unemployment during the pandemic (Kong and Prinz 2020).…”

Understanding the Relationships between Parenting Stress and Mental Health with Grandparent Kinship Caregivers’ Risky Parenting Behaviors in the Time of COVID-19

“…Reduced child maltreatment reporting during the pandemic does not indicate children are safe at home (Baron et al 2020). Risk factors (e.g., economic instability, parenting stress, mental distress) associated with risky parenting behaviors and child maltreatment risk have been identified as being exacerbated by COVID-19 (Jonson-Reid et al 2020;Humphreys et al 2020;Wu and Xu 2020). Previous studies conducted during the economic recession and other disasters, such as Hurricanes, suggest child maltreatment risk may be triggered by contextual stressors, particularly among vulnerable and low-income families (Brooks-Gunn et al 2013;Self-Brown et al 2013).…”

What Happened to the Prevention of Child Maltreatment During COVID-19? A Yearlong into the Pandemic Reflection

“…Moreover, researchers have been stressing that this decrease should not be attributed to an increase in the safety of children but rather due to the adverse impact of the lockdown on the system's ability to see and protect children (e.g., Baron et al, 2020;Katz & Cohen, 2020). In addition, there is growing evidence that during COVID-19, various CM risk factors significantly increased (Conrad-Hiebner & Byram, 2020;Proulx et al, 2021;Rodriguez et al, 2020;Wu & Xu, 2020), such as parental job loss (Lawson et al, 2020), parental social isolation (Lee et al, 2021), and mental health issues (Russell et al, 2020). Adding to this, parental stress was found to be a major CM risk factor that increased during COVID-19 and an increase in selfreported child abuse was found for parents experiencing heightened stressors (Lawson et al, 2020).…”