Study: Pandemic-related impact on family finances worsened child mental health
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on family finances worsened children’s stress and sadness levels.
- Researchers did not find a similar association between school closures and mental health.
For the first time, a study found a link between the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on family finances and children’s mental health, researchers reported.
Specifically, it found that financial disruptions during the pandemic worsened children’s levels of stress, sadness and worries related to COVID-19, with no similar impact seen from school closures, according to findings published in JAMA Network Open.
Yunyu Xiao, PhD, a health informatics researcher and an assistant professor in the department of population health science at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, told Healio that the study was motivated by her prior research on mental health disparities and suicide among essential workers, high-risk communities and children due to structural racism, inequality and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“During COVID-19, there has been discussion about the pandemic’s impact on child mental health, but few were able to identify the exact causes of worsened mental health,” Xiao said. “We have a prior study in JAMA Psychiatry that innovatively linked a longitudinal survey to over 20 external resources to characterize individual and structural, pre- and pandemic-related influences of [social determinants of health (SDoH)] on changes in child mental health from 2020-2021. The current work is built on that.”
Xiao and her colleagues used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study to examine 6,030 children aged between 12 and 14 years. Organizers of the ACBD study sent six online surveys to children and parents from May 2020 to May 2021, although the last of these surveys was omitted because 2021 unemployment rates linked to the data were unavailable. The researchers measured four mental health outcomes, including perceived stress, sadness, well-being and COVID-19-related worry, and three sleep outcomes: abnormal lengths of inertia, latency and duration.
Participants explained how often they felt sad or stressed through the Perceived Stress Scale, in which they answered by choosing a value on a five-point scale from 0 to 4.
Ultimately, children whose families experienced financial disruptions during the pandemic experienced on average a 205.2% (95% CI, 57.9%-509%) increase in perceived stress and a 112.1% (95% CI, 22.2%-268.1%) increase in sadness. Researchers found no significant association between school disruptions and mental health.
Xiao said she hopes the study will encourage primary care providers and pediatricians to ask about a child’s social needs when discussing their mental health. For parents, she said, it is most crucial to communicate with and listen to their children to better tackle the “good and bad.”
“Sometimes a parent is too dominant that they want to protect their kids, and forgetting that children are also growing up and have their own mindset,” Xiao said. “In this study, when families are experiencing multiple disruptions, especially financial disruptions, parents can discuss this with children more frankly, instead of hiding the reality. During COVID-19, it is hard to imagine one family has never experienced pandemic-related disruptions in SDoH, which is important to build trust, social support, and love that can reduce stress, sadness, and promote positive effects.”
Xiao noted that she and her fellow researchers are collecting more SDoH and policy data, and are considering macro-impacts such as discrimination, misinformation and Asian hate in their future work.
“Our group is planning more research to understand the long-term impact of SDoH on children and adolescent mental health,” Xiao said. “When facing public health emergencies, we should rely on multifaceted, evidence-based policy that put SDoH in the center of decision-making, together with clinical outcomes that are equally important.”
References:
Xiao Y, et al. JAMA Netw Open. 2023;doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.2716.
Xiao Y, et al. JAMA Psychiatry. 2023;doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2022.0818.