Mentally Contagious: An Investigation of Parent and Child Anxiety During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Date
2022-12-17
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7
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1
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The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered anxiety in millions of people around the world,
especially in parents and their children. These feelings of anxiety are even more prevalent
in vulnerable groups such as nurses, doctors, young adults, racial and ethnic minorities,
and unpaid caregivers for older adults. The goal of this study is to understand the relations
between household income, economic pressure, parent perceptions of COVID-19,
parent threat transmission to children, parent anxiety, and child anxiety during the
ongoing pandemic. I hypothesized that household income, economic pressure, and perceived
threat of the virus would all contribute to a rise in parental anxiety, which would
increase child anxiety. To test these hypotheses, an online survey was administered using
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to parents living in the state of Hawai‘i with at least
one child between the ages of 1–16 (n = 108). All participants were invited to report their
levels of anxiety, their child’s anxiety, household income, economic pressure, perception
of COVID-19, and parent threat transmission. Using structural equation modeling, a
measured variable path model was fit to the data, demonstrating excellent fit. The final
structural model revealed that household income predicted parent anxiety, and economic
pressure, which then predicted parent anxiety above and beyond income. In turn, parent
anxiety strongly predicted child anxiety.
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