Roos - The pandemic and families

The pandemic, starting in about March 2020, had really huge impacts on parent and family wellbeing in Canada and around the world. It was really interesting because there’s always moderate levels of parent stress and parent mental health challenges in across populations. But in the pandemic, we saw 3 to 6 fold increases in clinically significant parent mental health problems for both mothers and fathers and other caregivers that were really experienced across countries. So regardless of lockdown status, the fears of the illness contributed to these challenges. Financial stressors contributed to these challenges. And then lockdown and social isolation and closures of things like childcare and school also contributed. So, there were major impacts on family wellbeing that started in March 2020 and persisted for quite some time.  

One of the really big findings that we saw pretty robust across the pandemic, is that the effects of caregiver distress were really moderated or buffered in the presence of strong parent social support. So, we know that social support is always important, but we think it’s really, really important that, kids are not only receiving positive support from their parents and from their early childhood educators, but the early childhood educators and parents that they also have a supportive environment that they’re in. So, focusing on community building, modeling of friendships, modeling of kindness and conflict resolution are all going to be important things for kids to see.