Children’s conversations with their mothers may soften the impact of pandemic stress.
Bohanek, J. G., Platts, C. R., Patrick, M. M., Xu, N., Lottes, T., Reichard, E., O'Neal, C., Bennett, A., Blue, A., Felty, H., & Groh, A. M. (2025). COVID-19 pandemic stress and child adjustment: Examining the moderating role of mothers’ and fathers’ pandemic conversational style. Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001995
The stress brought on to families by COVID-19 is associated with more inward and outward struggles for young children, but conversations with their mothers may help to minimize those externally expressed effects (i.e., aggression, rule-breaking, disruptive behavior). Using language that supports a young child's understanding of a new or stressful experience can help them in many ways. Recognizing that the use of illustrative communication strategies favorably impacts children’s development of resilience during these times is crucial for maintaining their well-being. The researchers demonstrate that supportive conversations about past events enable parents to add structure to their young children’s understanding of events and help them make sense of difficult situations.
The study included information from fifty-six families, forty-five of which included fathers, who participated in a follow-up study on families’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic between May to July of 2020. During this time, children were on average about 4-5 years old. Each parent-child pair was interviewed separately and asked to talk about their child’s biggest challenge. Some spoke about fighting with their siblings or having plans canceled. They were also asked to talk about the child's most positive experience. These were often events such as spending time with family, learning new things, and playing outdoors. Researchers evaluated these conversations for mothers’ levels of elaboration (i.e., asking questions and making statements that encourage child contributions) and internal states language (i.e., use of emotion and cognition words). Specifically, the conversations were transcribed, and the authors marked words that expressed emotion (e.g., "happy", "excited", "cried"), thinking (e.g., "think", "realize", "remember"), and elaboration (encouraging details or supporting deeper answers). Researchers then counted how often parents used words that were supportive, emotional, or showed thinking when they talked about these past events.
It was expected that more supportive conversation styles during these dialogues would minimize children's struggles due to stress caused by the pandemic. Although both mothers and fathers often used highly supportive language when discussing their child's biggest challenge and their most positive experience, this did not seem to weaken the effects of COVID-19 stress on the children's internalizing symptoms (e.g., anxiety, worry, rumination). However, mothers were able to significantly minimize externalizing problems during both conversations with their children. This signals a gender difference in the key role parent-child conversations play in cushioning the blow that pandemic stressors can put on children.
Creating clarity during challenging times has been previously shown to be positively influential to children’s cognitive development, emotional understanding, emotion regulation skills, and sense of self. This study found that conversational style and parent gender play an essential role in our understanding of how conversations between parents and their children can mitigate the impact of pandemic stress. The findings of this study fuel the development of interventions that might support parents and caretakers as they work to uplift their children during future pandemics or pandemic-like experiences.
Written by Neelam Patel, NSF REU Intern with the Scientific Study of Interpersonal Relationships Across the Lifespan Site