The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Family Well-Being: A Literature Review

This finding builds upon burgeoning research exploring the role of children’s high emotionality in contributing to parent and child maladjustment during the pandemic (Zhou et al., 2021) and undermining structured parenting for parents experiencing high levels of distress. The largest proportion of sampled families (∼37%) were Managing, characterized as having slightly improved or unchanged parent-child relationship quality coupled with parents and children reporting positive adjustment and good mental health during shelter-in-place, high parent satisfaction in their role as a parent, and moderate efficacy. The purpose of the current investigation was to identify families that were thriving in the first months of the pandemic, examine what distinguished them from other families, and test whether family thriving conveyed lasting benefits for children’s mental health.

• The present study focuses on the role of family support to young adult children during COVID‐19 in ameliorating the negative financial impact of the pandemic.
• Indeed, it is well known that family stress can impact child well-being (Dalton et al., 2020), which might be particularly true when facing a pandemic that is perceived by children mostly through adults (e.g., through the media, parental narratives, and parental limitations).
• When adult children and parents are not agreeing on the attitudes toward COVID-19 and compliance toward preventive measures (30), this could translate into diverging expectations about support exchanges and negative interactions as well.
• Consequently, providing practical support and education to parents for assisting with the specific needs of highly emotional children could assist with their ability to effectively manage family functioning during the pandemic (e.g., Tuning into Kids®; Havighurst et al., 2020).
• The values of standard deviation remained well within prescribed range and the data was found to be good to enough to be handled using Mplus (Van Der Linden et al., 2017).

A U.S. National Study of Family Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Descriptive statistics and group comparisons between the main demographic characteristics of the low- and high-SES families are reported in Table 1. Results were interpreted by calculating an evidence ratio comparing the AIC of the best fitting model and the AIC of the baseline model (American Psychological Association and Akaike 1987; Wagenmakers & Farrell, 2004). For each dimension (i.e., stress related to COVID-19 and stress related lockdown), the sum of the items was computed. First, descriptive analyses were performed on all study variables together with relevant correlations.

Impact of COVID‐19 on positive outlook

Despite these challenges, we continue to see an improvement in the overall effectiveness grades of local authority children’s social care. This section reports on the current situation in children’s social care, as observed during our inspections, and gives examples of how the sector is managing these challenges. In their responses to the 2022 point-in-time survey, children and professionals gave examples of the ways staff had supported them in this area.footnote 29 The lockdown restrictions also meant that children were not able to see their families in person.footnote 28 Recognising that this was upsetting for families, some social workers and providers found creative ways, and made considerable efforts, to maintain communication and relationships. During the pandemic, social workers stayed in touch with the children they did not see face to face, or in addition to in-person contact, through video calls, phone calls or text messaging. Social workers expressed concerns about missing out on non-verbal cues, not being able to tell who else was in the room when speaking to children, being shown only positive things by families, and virtual contact being easier to evade for some families.footnote 21

Developing local resources

That is, when perceived stress is high, it probably represents an unbearable threat that undermines all other processes. This might have made them more capable of handling difficult situations involving COVID-19-related stress. A possible explanation might be that those living in a low-SES contexts may put greater effort in trying to accept stressors and to adjust oneself to deal with stressful situations through different strategies. Although the lockdown also caused significant distress, this was rated as slightly less disturbing. Yet these variables were not selected in the final model (and also when included did not change the results), hence for the sake of simplicity they were left out from the beginning.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing body of research has shown increased psychopathological symptoms among parents and children 16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25, and significant associations with parenting stress levels 5,18,20, parents’ past trauma 40,41, and 2025 US Tornadoes and Severe Storms relief parents’ resilience 6,45,50. As evidenced above, parents’ psychopathological symptoms due to COVID-19 may lead to children’s psychopathological symptoms both directly than through parenting stress levels 5,18,28,29. In line with this, recent studies have confirmed the significant mediation role played by parenting stress on the relationship between parents’ psychopathological symptoms resulting from COVID-19 and children’s psychopathological difficulties 5,18,29.