Parent–Child Relationships, Digital Media Use and Parents’ Well-Being during COVID-19 Home Confinement: The Role of Family Resilience

Marina Everri (), Mattia Messena, Finiki Nearchou and Laura Fruggeri
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Marina Everri: School of Medicine, University College Dublin, D04 V1W8 Dublin, Ireland
Mattia Messena: School of Medicine, University College Dublin, D04 V1W8 Dublin, Ireland
Finiki Nearchou: School of Psychology, University College Dublin, D04 V1W8 Dublin, Ireland
Laura Fruggeri: Centro Bolognese di Terapia della Famiglia, 40121 Bologna, Italy

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 23, 1-12

Abstract: Research has provided substantial evidence on the role of parents’ well-being in the quality of parent–child relationships and children’s adjustment. Parents’ stress and parental couple conflict have been linked to children’s adverse developmental outcomes. However, little is known about the factors that affect parents’ well-being when coping with multiple stressors such as those brought by the recent COVID-19 global pandemic. Our study intended to examine the predictors of parental well-being by looking at the contextual factors of COVID-19 home confinement, i.e., the use of digital media and parents’ domestic workload, and family resilience in two countries: Ireland and Italy. Additionally, the age and number of children were controlled as potential variables impacting parents’ well-being. A three-step hierarchical regression analysis was applied. The results showed that family resilience was a very strong predictor of parents’ well-being after controlling for any other variable. Parental couples’ conflict over the use of technology predicted lower levels of parents’ well-being, while, notably, parent child-conflict and domestic workload were not associated with parents’ well-being. Additionally, the age of children did play a role: the higher the mean age of children in the family the better the parents’ well-being. The findings are discussed in the light of cross-country differences and their implications for research and practice.

Keywords: parents’ well-being; technology interference; family resilience; parental stress; marital conflict; digital media; ICT; COVID-19; lockdown (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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