Rituals in the Time of COVID-19: Imagination,Responsiveness, and the Human Spirit

Following the format put forth by Imber-Black and Roberts, I examine daily rituals, family traditions, holidays, and life cycle rituals during the pandemic of COVID-19. Marked by symbols capable of carrying multiple meanings, symbolic actions, special time and special place, and newly invented and adapted rituals are illustrated through stories of couples, families, and communities.     

Editorial: Applications of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy in Response to COVID-19

The corona virus (COVID-19) continues to have a devastating health, economic, and social impact on our local and international communities. Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies (CBTs), as a family of therapies that posit cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and interpersonal change processes in the understanding and successful treatment of mental health disorders, have risen to the challenge. This special issue represents contributions from CBT experts on the impact on psychopathology, new assessment methods, adaptations of integrated behavioral health, telehealth, psychology training, and discusses a public health framework. The issue includes a series of articles offering guidance for the clinician on interventions for those impacted by trauma, CBT for youth and families, and telehealth for psychotic spectrum disorders and group therapy for social anxiety.     

COVID-19 pandemic impact on family life and exacerbated emotional and behavioral health among preschool children: A longitudinal study

Background/ObjectiveThis study aimed to examine associations of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on family life with emotional and behavioral health among preschool children.MethodsA longitudinal study including 1595 preschool children aged 3–6 years and their families was conducted in Anhui Province. The linear regression was applied to examine associations between the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on family life and emotional and behavioral health.ResultsResults of the multivariable linear regression indicated that the severe impact of COVID-19 pandemic on family life was significantly associated with more sleep problems, poor dietary behavior habits, more anxiety symptoms, and more problematic behaviors; and these effects exhibited gender and age differences.ConclusionsThe severe impact of COVID-19 pandemic on family life significantly increased the risk for exacerbated emotional and behavioral health among preschool children. It is considered vital to identify risk factors for vulnerable families and then to implement precise interventions when necessary for emotional and behavioral health of children in these families.     

Life Interrupted: Family Routines Buffer Stress during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Adoption of certain behavioral and social routines that organize and structure the home environment may help families navigate the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The current cross-sectional study aimed to assess family routines prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic and examine associations with individual and family well-being. Using a national sample, 300 caregivers of children ages 6-18 were surveyed using Amazon Mechanical Turk platform during the first three months of COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Caregivers reported on family demographics, COVID-19-related stress, engagement in family routines (prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic), stress mindset, self-efficacy, and family resiliency. Overall, families reported engaging in fewer routines during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to prior to the pandemic. COVID-19-related stress was highest in low-income families, families of healthcare workers, and among caregivers who had experienced the COVID-19 virus. Moreover, COVID-19-related stress was negatively related to self-efficacy, positively related to an enhancing stress mindset, and negatively related to family resilience. Engagement in family routines buffered relations between COVID-19-related stress and family resilience, such that COVID-19-related stress was not associated with lower family resilience among families that engaged in high levels of family routines. Results suggest that family routines were challenging to maintain in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, but were associated with better individual and family well-being during this period of acute health, economic, and social stress.

     

Caught between Scylla and Charybdis: How Economic Stressors and Occupational Risk Factors Influence Workers’ Occupational Health Reactions to COVID-19

Workers and their families bear much of the economic burden of COVID-19. Even though they have declined somewhat, unemployment rates are considerably higher than before the start of the pandemic. Many workers also face uncertainty about their future employment prospects and increasing financial strain. At the same time, the workplace is a common source of transmission of COVID-19 and many jobs previously seen as relatively safe are now viewed as potentially hazardous. Thus, many workers face dual threats of economic stress and COVID-19 exposure. This paper develops a model of workers’ responses to these dual threats, including risk perception and resource depletion as mediating factors that influence the relationship of economic stress and occupational risk factors with COVID-19 compliance-related attitudes, safe behavior at work, and physical and mental health outcomes. The paper also describes contextual moderators of these relationships at the individual, unit, and regional level. Directions for future research are discussed.     

Psychological implications of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world: Introduction to the special issue

Although psychological researchers have long studied the implications of major crises, the outbreak and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have confronted the global community of psychologists and psychological researchers with new challenges. This special issue contributes to the growing empirical literature on the immediate psychological implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. We present and discuss diverse work from authors that followed our call for papers in May 2020, shortly after the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. The studies focus on the early phases of the pandemic by addressing (a) implications of the pandemic for psychological well-being and mental health, (b) psychological effects of lockdown scenarios as well as (c) individual compliance with COVID-19 prevention and intervention measures. We conclude by highlighting the need for new research efforts, with a special focus on low- and middle-income regions, international research collaborations and cross-cultural research designs.     

Sibling conflict during COVID-19 in families with special educational needs and disabilities

Young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SENDs) and their families have been particularly hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this longitudinal study, sibling conflict in these families during and after the first lockdown in the United Kingdom was investigated. Online questionnaires were completed by 504 parents of young people with SENDs at four time points between 23 March 2020 and 10 October 2020 (over half completed the questionnaire at multiple time points). As lockdown progressed, young people with SENDs were more likely to be picked on or hurt by their siblings compared with earlier stages of the lockdown but there was no change in how frequently they harmed or picked on their siblings. After lockdown, both perpetration and victimization decreased but not to the same rates as the first month of lockdown. Young people with SENDs with severe or complex needs were somewhat protected from sibling conflict. Findings are discussed with reference to implications for support and planning for future pandemics.     

Phone follow up to families of COVID-19 patients who died at the hospital: families' grief reactions and clinical psychologists' roles

A proportion of persons affected by coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) die and do so in extraordinary circumstances. This can make grief management extremely challenging for families. The Clinical Psychology unit of an Italian hospital offered a bereavement follow-up call to such families. This study aimed to explore the families' experiences and needs collected during these calls, and the role that the psychologists played through the call. A total of 246 families were called over 3 months. Multiple qualitative methods included: (i) written reports of the calls with relatives of patients who died at the hospital for COVID-19; (ii) qualitative semi-structured interviews with psychologists involved in the calls; (iii) observation of psychologists' peer group discussions. A thematic analysis was conducted. Six themes emerged: without death rituals, solitary, unexpected, unfair, unsafe, coexisting with other stressors. Families' reactions were perceived by psychologists as close to a traumatic grief. Families' needs ranged from finding alternative rituals to giving meaning and expressing different emotions. The psychologists played both a social-institutional and a psychological-human role through the calls (e.g., they cured disrupted communication or validated feelings and choices). This study highlighted the potential of traumatic grief of families of COVID-19 victims, and provided indications for supporting them within the space of a short phone call.     

Integrating Advocacy for Marginalized Children and Families Into Evidence-Based Care During COVID-19: Clinical Vignettes

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has disproportionately impacted the health and socioeconomic outcomes for low-income populations, people of color, and immigrant children and families in the United States. As inequities in resources (i.e., food, internet, housing), health care, and education increased for marginalized families as a result of COVID-19, child-focused clinicians had to broaden their professional scope and implement new advocacy efforts. The current paper uses clinical vignettes taken from a New York State Office of Mental Health–licensed child and adolescent outpatient clinic in the Bronx, New York. The vignettes highlight the social inequities that impacted marginalized children and families during the pandemic, as well as the clinical team’s response through the integration of evidence-base practice and advocacy. Implications for practice with vulnerable populations as the COVID-19 pandemic persists are discussed.     

Expanding Possibilities: Flexibility and Solidarity with Under-resourced Immigrant Families During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The novel coronavirus has added new anxieties and forms of grieving to the myriad practical and emotional burdens already present in the lives of underserved and uninsured immigrant families and communities. In this article, we relate our experiences since the COVID-19 crisis to the lessons we have learned over time as mental health professionals working with families in no-cost, student-managed community comprehensive health clinics in academic-community partnerships. We compare and contrast the learnings of flexibility of time, space, procedures, or attendance we acquired in this clinical community setting during regular times, with the new challenges families and therapists face, and the adaptations needed to continue to work with our clients in culturally responsive and empowering ways during the COVID-19 pandemic. We describe families, students, professionals, promotoras (community links), and IT support staff joining together in solidarity as the creative problem solvers of new possibilities when families do not have access to Wi-Fi, smartphones, or computers, or suffer overcrowding and lack of privacy. We describe many anxieties related to economic insecurity or fear of facing death alone, but also how to visualize expanding possibilities in styles of parenting or types of emotional support among family members as elements of hope that may endure beyond these unprecedented tragic times of loss and uncertainty.     

Burden and Growth during COVID-19: Comparing Parents of Children with and without Disabilities

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken to contain it have had a disproportionate impact on families with young children, especially with disabilities....     

Clinical Supervision of Couple and Family Therapy during COVID-19

This paper addresses the need for a swift transition from in-person clinical supervision to telesupervision during the time of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Five specific areas will be discussed in the effort to enhance the quality of clinical supervision provided to couple and family therapists in training at this time including the following: (1) COVID-19 and the structural changes and technological adaptation of supervision; (2) culturally and contextually sensitive guidelines for clinical supervision during COVID-19; (3) the supervisee’s competence and the clinical supervisory process; (4) the new set of boundaries and the supervisory role; (5) and the supervisory alliance and supervisees’ vulnerabilities in the face of COVID-19.     

Racial reckoning,resistance, and the revolution: A call to community psychology to move forward

This article introduces a special issue of the American Journal of Community Psychology that features racial reckoning, resistance and the revolution in the context of a syndemic, the historical subjugation of communities of Color (COC) to racial hierarchies and the coronavirus (COVID-19). More specifically, this special issue underscores the need for community psychology and other allied disciplines to address this syndemic facing COC. The special issue delivers on the stories of the lived experiences from researchers and community members as it relates to COVID-19 and COC. Twelve articles are illuminated to challenge the field to create social change.     

Parent and child adjustment dual trajectories at the beginning of the COVID-19 syndemic

Children and their families have been significantly impacted by the unfolding of the COVID-19 syndemic. We sought to identify (1) groups of families with distinct profiles of joint trajectories of parental anxiety and child emotional distress and (2) protective and risk factors associated with these dual-trajectory profiles. A sample of 488 parents (65% White; 77% mothers) with 3- to 8-year-old children (M_Age = 5.04, SD_Age = 1.59) was followed from late March to early July in 2020. Survey data on parent (i.e., anxiety symptoms) and child (i.e., emotional distress) adjustment were collected at three time points. Using multivariate growth mixture modeling, we identified one group with low parental anxiety and child emotional distress (42.7%) and three other distinct groups with varying risk levels among parents and/or children. We also identified protective (e.g., positive parenting) and risk (e.g., child negative affect, negative parenting, perceived stress with racism) factors in predicting parent and child adjustment. It can be concluded that, overall, our sample (mostly middle- and high-socioeconomic status families) demonstrated family resilience amid COVID-19, consistent with prior disaster coping literature. At the same time, our findings also indicated the need to identify at-risk families and modifiable factors for post-disaster public health interventions.     

Therapist Experiences and Attitudes About Implementing Internet-Delivered Parent-Child Interaction Therapy During COVID-19

It has been widely recognized that access to mental health treatment is imperative to address current and long-term stressors for children and parents during COVID-19. Internet-delivered Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (iPCIT, previously referred to as I-PCIT) is a strong model for remote service delivery during social distancing restrictions due to its empirical base. However, this treatment modality was not widely implemented before COVID-19, likely due to barriers to providing telehealth services. This mixed methods study conducted a follow-up survey to gather therapist experiences (N = 223) in delivering iPCIT during COVID-19, including qualitative data on the benefits and challenges to delivering iPCIT. The vast majority of therapists (82%) indicated that they transitioned to deliver PCIT via telehealth in response to COVID-19. PCIT caseloads decreased slightly from the first survey to the COVID-19 follow-up survey, but the racial and ethnic composition of caseloads were not significantly different between the two surveys. Of the 183 therapists who transitioned to deliver PCIT via telehealth, 82% expressed interest in continuing to provide iPCIT following the COVID-19 pandemic. Reported benefits of iPCIT included decreased barriers to access and the ability to practice skills within the naturalistic home environment. Challenges to iPCIT were primarily issues with technology as well as other logistical barriers, which could limit engagement for some families. Findings from this study may be beneficial in improving future implementation of iPCIT during and post-COVID-19.     

From model minority to yellow peril: How threat perceptions and disgust predict anti-Asian prejudice during COVID-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic, hate crimes against Asians sharply increased in the United States. We investigated whether the threat of contracting COVID-19 and specific negative emotions (disgust, anxiety, fear, and anger) regarding COVID-19 predicted anti-Asian prejudice in a 3-wave longitudinal study of non-Asian American adults (N = 486) in the early days of the pandemic in 2020. In all 3 timepoints, participants who believed that they may have already contracted COVID and those who expressed greater disgust reported more anti-Asian attitudes, evaluated Asians as less than human, tolerated anti-Asian prejudice, and blamed Asians for spreading COVID-19. In a well-fitting longitudinal path model, we found longitudinal evidence for these associations, such that the belief that one had already contracted COVID-19 in March 2020 predicted greater disgust one month later, in April 2020, which in turn predicted greater anti-Asian prejudice in May 2020.     

Parent–Child Relationships and the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Exploratory Qualitative Study with Parents in Early,Middle, and Late Adulthood

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on families is currently unknown. Parents and children have experienced a variety of changes as public health interventions have been implemented to slow the spread of the virus. The current exploratory qualitative study recruited parents (n?=?365) in early (ages 20–34), middle (ages 35–64), and late (ages 65 and older) adulthood to understand how the early weeks of the pandemic influenced their parent–child relationships. Participants completed an online survey between March 21 and 31, 2020. Three themes emerged through qualitative content analysis: (1) relational steadiness, (2) navigating COVID-19 challenges in relationships, and (3) relational enhancement.

     

Loneliness and the sexual behavior of sexual minority men in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic

In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian provincial governments instituted a variety of public health measures that included social distancing and isolation, which may have had unintended consequeses. According to the Loneliness and Sexual Risk Model, gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBM) often cope with loneliness through risky sexual behaviors. Previous studies have demonstrated that COVID-19 measures such as social distancing and isolation led to increases in loneliness; thus, these measures may also have led to elevated sexual risk-taking among some GBM. Participants were recruited from an ongoing cohort study on GBM health and well-being, and were included in the current analysis if they had completed relevant study questions (n = 1134). GBM who reported lower levels of social support pre-COVID-19, were younger, and lived alone each reported greater loneliness during the first year of COVID-19. Although feelings of loneliness did not predict sexual risk-taking within the first year of COVID-19, loneliness did predict greater sexual risk-taking 6 months later. Additionally, younger GBM and those living alone were more likely to engage in sexual risk-taking at both COVID-19 data collection points. These findings offer some support of the Loneliness and Sexual Risk Model; however, it is possible that the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a temporary suspension of this association, as many GBM took steps to protect themselves and partners in the context of COVID-19.     

A Preliminary Study of COVID-19-related Stressors,Parenting Stress,and Parental Psychological Well-being Among Parents of School-age Children

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial health, social, and economic effects on families. Consequent lockdowns and school closures heightened the burden on...     

Family Science in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Solutions and New Directions

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has precipitated substantial global disruption and will continue to pose major challenges. In recognition of the challenges currently faced by family scientists, we share our perspectives about conducting family research in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are two primary issues we address in this article. First, we present a range of potential solutions to challenges in research, resulting from the pandemic, and discuss strategies for preserving ongoing research efforts. We discuss approaches to scaling back existing protocols, share ideas for adapting laboratory-based measures for online administration (e.g., using video chat platforms), and suggest strategies for addressing missing data and reduced sample size due to lower participation rates and funding restrictions. We also discuss the importance of measuring COVID-19 relevant factors to use as controls or explore as moderators of primary hypotheses. Second, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic represents a scientifically important context for understanding how families adjust and adapt to change and adversity. Increased stress precipitated by the pandemic, varying from acute stress associated with job loss to more chronic and enduring stress, will undoubtedly take a toll. We discuss ways that family scientists can contribute to pandemic-related research to promote optimal family functioning and protect the health of family members.