Interparental Conflict and Parenting in the Context of COVID-19

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The COVID-19 pandemic has historic implications on the health and wellbeing of families and children. Starting in March of 2020, efforts to limit the spread of the virus has created unprecedented challenges and stress to family functioning, including economic declines and job loss, health risks, school closures and disruption to family routines, and increased domestic violence and harsh parenting. Despite evidence indicating that COVID-19 increases rates of interparental hostility and parent-child difficulties, little is known about the lasting effect of COVID-19 on families, particularly how it may modulate the degree and nature of the interdependencies between family relationships or subsystems in ways that modify family functioning. Grounded in the theoretically rich conceptualizations of family systems and spillover processes, this time-sensitive application seeks to explore how the extra-familial perturbations associated with COVID-19 modify associations between interparental hostility and discord and harsh, punitive parenting. This application builds on an existing dataset (Phase 1, N = 235 families) that was collected over a three-year period immediately prior to the onset of the pandemic, and we propose to collect three additional waves of data post-onset of COVID-19. The strength of this application involves the utilization of a quasi-experiment design with the establishment of pre-COVID-baseline for family functioning, and both phases (six waves in total) will utilize multi-method, multi-informant, and multi-level longitudinal design to assess ecological contexts, family dynamics, parent and child characteristics, and parenting behaviors. This study will elucidate how COVID-19 impacts spillover processes and may have enduring effects on family functioning and advance new process-oriented approaches to understanding how COVID-19 modulated spillover processes through mediating mechanism of parental neurobiological and cognitive self-regulation. Furthermore, the present application will identify the preexisting individual or ecological factors as well as COVID-19 related changes in family functioning as risk or protective factors in the spillover processes. The results of this application will have significant implications for understanding the ramifications of COVID-19 on family functioning and have high potential to generate knowledge on targets for evidence-based prevention programs.