Dataset Information

Making sense of the pandemic: Parent-child conversations in two cultural contexts.

ABSTRACT: The present study focused on parent-child conversations about COVID-19 related changes in children's lives in Estonia and Germany with an aim to understand how children's conceptual understanding of the disease and their emotional security is created and reflected in these interactions. Twenty-nine parent-child dyads from both cultural contexts provided self-recorded conversations. The conversations were analyzed for the type of explanations, emotional content, and valence. Estonian conversations were longer than those of German dyads. Explanatory talk appeared in both contexts but was general in nature. Conversations in both cultural contexts also included very few emotional references and tended to focus on both positive and negative aspects of the situation. The conversations show that parents tend to support children's coping with stressful situations by helping them conceptually understand COVID-19 and paying little attention to children's comprehension of feelings about the situation.

SUBMITTER: Tougu P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9870112 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Making sense of the pandemic: Parent-child conversations in two cultural contexts.

Tõugu Pirko P Tulviste Tiia T Schröder Lisa L

PloS one 20230123 1

The present study focused on parent-child conversations about COVID-19 related changes in children's lives in Estonia and Germany with an aim to understand how children's conceptual understanding of the disease and their emotional security is created and reflected in these interactions. Twenty-nine parent-child dyads from both cultural contexts provided self-recorded conversations. The conversations were analyzed for the type of explanations, emotional content, and valence. Estonian conversation ...[more]

PMID: 36689431

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundMental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have not been felt equally within populations. Parents with children living at home were early on identified as a population at heightened mental health risk, with concerns about the potential long-term impacts of the pandemic on parents' mental health, family functioning, and children's well-being. This study investigates impacts of the pandemic on parents' psychological distress, contextual sources of distress, and associations with family functioning nearly two years into the pandemic.Methods and findingsData were drawn from a national cross-sectional survey of adults living in Canada in November and December 2021 that was representative by age, gender, household income, and region. Parents with children < 18 years old living at home (N = 553) reported their experiences of psychological distress, pandemic-related stressors, coping mechanisms, and family functioning (changes in parent-child interactions, children's anxiety). Chi-square tests, logistic regression, and linear regression analyses examined sociodemographic inequities in parents' levels of psychological distress, sources and mitigating mechanisms of distress, and associations between psychological distress and family functioning. Nearly two years into the pandemic, parents with children at home reported nearly double pre-pandemic population estimates of moderate to severe psychological distress. Psychological distress was more frequently reported among parents with pre-existing mental health conditions, disabilities, and financial stressors. Parents with greater psychological distress reported increases in negative parent-child interactions due to the pandemic and higher anxiety among their children.ConclusionsThis study identifies sustained negative impacts of the pandemic on parents' mental health and family functioning in Canada nearly two years into the pandemic, despite high vaccine uptake and declining infection rates. Disparities in financial stress, social support structures, and pre-existing mental health were identified as underlying sources of psychological distress. These results highlight that meaningful responses to promote mental health among parents and families must address social and structural inequities.

Project description:Cultural psychology assumes that the ecocultural conditions of a particular setting shape children's pathways, resulting in multiple adaptive solutions to universal developmental tasks. While the adaptivity of attachment and children's psychosocial development during the early years has been thoroughly investigated, attachment research during middle childhood continues to reflect Western ideals of family. Adhering to ideas of monotropy, most studies only focus on parental attachment figures. However, this restricted empirical perspective does not only result in a Eurocentric bias, it also neglects theoretical reflections on the growing complexity of attachment during middle childhood, thus only considering a limited selection of all individuals contributing to the children's feeling of security, even in Western settings. To investigate the variability and adaptivity of attachment during middle childhood, this study assessed children's attachment figures in two extreme settings of development, introducing an exhaustive network perspective on attachment during this developmental stage. Children of the Cameroonian Nseh (N = 11) and German children from Bad Nauheim (N = 11) identified and differentiated all individuals contributing to their attachment need in an exploratory and transdisciplinary approach. The socio-structural composition of children's attachment networks follows the context-specific systems of care and concepts of interconnectedness and the ecological features of each setting, resulting in marked differences between both contexts. The functional composition, however, reflects children's preoccupation with similar developmental challenges across settings. Same-aged peers contribute to the children's feeling of safety in both settings, thereby deviating from previous reflections on their subordinate relevance during middle childhood. Overall, these results support the adaptiveness of children's attachment patterns while also demonstrating universal trends across contexts. They highlight the collective nature of attachment during middle childhood that exceeds the impact of individual dyads. Thus, broad and context-sensitive research strategies become a necessary addition to attachment research in order to generate an exhaustive understanding for children's development across cultural contexts.

Dataset Information

Making sense of the pandemic: Parent-child conversations in two cultural contexts.

Publications

Making sense of the pandemic: Parent-child conversations in two cultural contexts.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets