Parents’ Experience during Negative Life Events: How COVID-19 Stress and Perceived Impacts Predict Parent-Child Informant Discrepancies

• Anh Van (Summer) Nguyen, Psychology, University of South Florida

• Christina Barbieri, School of Education, University of Delaware

Parents and children often hold differing views on various issues, including whether a child’s behavior is perceived as problematic. Such parent-child discrepancies are consistently linked to indicators of negative parent-child interaction. Stress and negative life events can exacerbate these discrepancies by influencing parents’ perceptions of their children’s behaviors, potentially leading parents to report more children’s problems. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a significant stress-inducing event affecting everyone’s life, especially parents. This study investigates how parental stress and their perception of impacts from COVID-19 are linked to the discrepancies between parents’ and their children’s ratings of children’s behaviors, or parent-child informant discrepancy. Children’s self-regulation was selected as the target construct for measuring discrepancy, as it is an important indicator of children’s behavioral difficulties. Through this study, we hope to understand parents’ experiences during negative life events, represented here by the COVID-19 pandemic, and how these experiences contribute to the discrepancy between parents’ and children’s perceptions of children’s behaviors. This study used secondary data collected in summer 2021, consisting of 704 parent-child dyads who were white-dominant and well-educated. A multiple regression was conducted with parental stress and perceived impact of the pandemic as predictors. The results suggest that parental stress, but not perceived COVID-19 impacts, significantly predicted discrepancies. Parental stress had small effect size but accounted for nearly all the explained variance, suggesting that stress is the primary driver of parent-child discrepancies. The linear and quadratic term of parental stress demonstrated a curvilinear relationship between parental stress and discrepancies, such that discrepancies initially decrease as parental stress increases, but begin to rise again at higher stress levels. This finding suggests that there are optimal stress levels at which gaps between informants are smallest. Future studies should replicate these results on a more representative sample and under different aversive contexts besides COVID-19.