The Second Pandemic

The coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has caused a pandemic of acute respiratory syndrome (COVID-19) with far-reaching global impacts. Governments’ responses across the world have ranged from physical distancing to partial or complete lockdowns of their populations to slow the rate of transmission of the highly infectious disease. With the closure of businesses and workplaces, the pandemic had a significant financial impact on people and the global economy. The daily lives of families and children have also been transformed, as many countries have closed schools, parks, and child-care facilities. The United Nations’ Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization estimates that 1.38 billion children were out of school or child care and did not have access to group and outdoor activities, team sports, or playgrounds as a result of the pandemic (cited in Cluver et al. 2020).

Although physical distancing and lockdown measures can help reduce community-based transmissions of the COVID-19 virus, they can also be detrimental to family life (Cluver et al. 2020). Many parents are attempting to work remotely from home while caring for children. Parents with school-going children also face new demands of home-based schooling. These demands are even greater for parents who must additionally care for older adults or children with chronic behavioral problems, special needs, or disabilities. Given the high degree of economic uncertainty facing many families, parents are often caring for their children under stressful conditions with limited resources. Coyne et al. (2020) described the stressful “collision of roles, responsibilities, and expectations” (i.e., as a parent, spouse, employee, employer, caregiver, teacher) experienced by parents during this pandemic as they face great uncertainty about the future. As parental stress increases, researchers have warned about the increased risk of family violence and child abuse during this period when families remain at home with reduced community contact and external social support (Brown et al. 2020; Campbell 2020). Child protection services (CPS) across countries impacted by COVID-19 are reporting an increase in cases and referrals of child abuse (Agrawal 2020; Channel News Asia [CNA], 2020a).

Parenting Stress

Parenting contributes in important ways to the course and outcome of child development (National Academies of Sciences 2016) and parental stress is one important area of focus in parenting research. In Abidin (1992)’s Parental Stress Model, parental stress is a key determinant of parenting practices, especially dysfunctional parenting. Based on Deater-Deckard (1998), parental stress has been defined as a psychological reaction when parents experience parental demands that are inconsistent with expectations (expectations of self or from others) or when parents do not have the resources to meet these demands (as cited in Holly et al. 2019). Parental stress is conceptually distinct from other forms of stress that a parent might experience (e.g., marital or work stress), although they are often associated (Holly et al. 2019).

Parenting During Circuit-breaker in Singapore (Chung, 2020)

The“Circuit-breaker” safety distancing was implemented in Singapore from April to May 2020. Schools and workplaces were closed and parents had to balance telecommuting with parenting responsibilities. Coupled with the high degree of economic uncertainty and reduced social support, these circumstances were hypothesized to increase parenting stress. (Chung, 2020) collected data from 258 parents living in Singapore using online surveys disseminated through Facebook and community organizations. Results indicated that parenting stress was a significant mediator in the relationship between the perceived impact of COVID-19 and (a) parent-child closeness (indirect effect = −.30, Bootstrap 99% CI[−.59, −.11]) and (b) harsh parenting (indirect effect = .58, Bootstrap 99% CI[.25, .94]). The impact of COVID-19 and stay-home orders increased parenting stress. This, in turn, had a negative impact on parenting by affecting parents’ relationship with their children and increasing the use of harsh parenting. Given that these are risk factors for potential child abuse, supporting parents and mitigating the impact of COVID-19 are important.

Purpose:

Investigate the effects of parenting stress on child and parenting outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic

Eligibility criteria

Information sources

Only peer-reviewed journal articles, thesis/dissertations, and preprints were included. Information sources include Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA), Social Service Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, Social science database, ERIC, Criminal justice database, Proquest Dissertation & Theses Global, CINAHL, and PsycInfo. We searched for these articles using the OVID, Proquest, and EBsco databases. Google Scholar and WHO COVID-19 database were also used to gather additional eligible studies.

Search startegy

Our search for articles were limited to January 2020 (first COVID-19 case in the world) to May 31st 2022 (last day of search).

PRISMA Flow-chart

The PRISMA statement defines an evidence-based, minimal set of items for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The flow-chart describes the identification, screening, eligibility and inclusion or studies in systematic reviews

Information on Studies

Information on the Caregivers

Information on the Children

Effect Sizes

Effect size of parenting stress on children internalizing behaviors:

Effect size of parenting stress on children externalizing behaviors:

Effect size of parenting stress on parents’ parenting behaviors:

Effect size of parenting stress on parents’ mental health:

Effect size of parenting stress on parent-child relationship/bonding:

Moderators of Effect Sizes

Only effect sizes with 10 or more studies are analyed. None of the moderators are statistically significant.

Check for Publication Bias Due to Small-study effects

Publication bias exists when the probability of a study getting published is affected by its results. In this review, we made efforts to reduce this possibility with a clear, systematic, and rigorous search to include all possible studies relevant within our pre-specified eligiibility criteria.

Another way is to use statistical methods to identify possible publication bias. Many of these statistical techniques are specifically for identifying possible small-study effects that lead to publication bias. Refer to this for explaination.

Contour funnel plots and Egger’s regression test for funnel plot asymmetry were ran for each of the four outcomes. Results show that only “parenting behaviors” outcome seem to have indications of funnel plot asymmetry. The funnel plot indicated that one small-study (bottom-right) might have one missing small-study on the left. This “missing” study is not likely to change the results. Thus, the overall effect size for “parenting beh” would still be valid but with possibilities of a little over-estimation. Note that Egger’s test is likely to be under-powered for “parent-child relationship” because there is only k=6 studies.

## Eggers' test of the intercept 
## ============================= 
## 
##  intercept   95% CI     t         p
##        3.7 -1.6 - 9 1.368 0.1986875
## 
## Eggers' test does not indicate the presence of funnel plot asymmetry.

## Eggers' test of the intercept 
## ============================= 
## 
##  intercept       95% CI     t         p
##      1.122 -3.15 - 5.39 0.515 0.6138099
## 
## Eggers' test does not indicate the presence of funnel plot asymmetry.

## Eggers' test of the intercept 
## ============================= 
## 
##  intercept     95% CI     t         p
##      4.008 0.5 - 7.52 2.239 0.0448448
## 
## Eggers' test indicates the presence of funnel plot asymmetry.

## Eggers' test of the intercept 
## ============================= 
## 
##  intercept      95% CI      t         p
##     -1.681 -9.8 - 6.44 -0.406 0.7058195
## 
## Eggers' test does not indicate the presence of funnel plot asymmetry.

A summary of the effect sizes.

A summary of the effect sizes with confidence intervals.