The Impact of Covid-19 on Children: Parent-Rated Stress due to Covid-19, Parenting Styles, and Children’s Defense Mechanism Use

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a significant source of stress for families worldwide (Beland et al., 2020). Among the multitude of methods individuals may utilize to manage and adapt to stressors includes psychological defenses, or defense mechanisms. Past research has found support for Cramer’s theory of defenses (2009) which makes two key claims regarding stress and defense use: 1.) as stress increases so too does the use of defenses and 2.) as stress increases, less adaptive or immature defenses are more likely to be used. This theory has been supported across a variety of ages, types of stressors, and settings (Zimmerman et al., 2019; Huh & Sin, 2015), however there is a lack of research on whether this can be observed in real-world contexts with longer-term stress such as the pandemic. Additionally, past research has found parenting styles and other similar aspects of parenting to impact a variety of outcomes in children including ability to cope, resilience, and defense use (Fonseca et al., 2020; Zakeri et al., 2010; Wolmer et al., 2001). However, while previous research has found separate links between these factors that suggest a possible overall relationship, little research has been done on the relationship as a whole. There are two main goals of this study; the first being to identify how children’s use of defenses changed in response to the stress of the pandemic, and the second being to look more specifically at the possible relationship between parent-rated stress due to Covid-19, parenting styles, and children’s defense use at their baseline before the pandemic as compared to at the height of the pandemic. A total of 316 participants were recruited through CloudResearch’s Prime Panels in order to gather a sample of parents with at least one child between ages 4 and 12. Statistical analyses found that parents rated their children as having used the same type of defenses at a higher frequency during the height of the pandemic relative to their baseline. It was also found that both a partial and a full mediation relationship existed between parental distress due to the pandemic and the type of defenses children used during the pandemic, with the type of parenting style acting as the mediator. Implications from this research include investigating interventions which can help parents avoid permissive parenting and promote authoritative parenting to reduce children’s use of non-adaptive defenses and promote their use of healthy defenses. Furthermore, providers working with families could do quick check-ins and route families greatly impacted by the pandemic to sources of support and interventions for the family as a whole in order to, at least in part, benefit children.