Relationships Among Parenting Stress and Well-Being, COVID-19 Information Management, and Children\u27s COVID-19 Fear

Objective: During the COVID-19 pandemic, caregivers who are facing high stress levels and decreased emotional well-being may parent their children differently. Certain children are experiencing greater fear in response to COVID-19, and research is needed to identify parenting behaviors significantly linked with children\u27s COVID-19 fear. The purpose of this article was to evaluate whether the association between parenting stress and children\u27s COVID-19 fear could be explained by parents\u27 COVID-19 information management and emotional well-being. Methods: Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The sample consisted of 595 caregivers of children during the COVID-19 pandemic; 40.0% men, 69.2% non-Latinx White, 12.1% Black, 10.1% Latinx, 6.6% Asian, and \u3c2% others. Children had an average age of 11.3 years. Parents completed self-report measures. Results: The bootstrapped confidence interval (0.040, 0.148) for the indirect effect (0.090) revealed that parent emotional well-being significantly mediated the relation between parenting stress and children\u27s COVID-19 fear. In addition, parent management of children\u27s COVID-19 knowledge significantly mediated the relation between parenting stress and children\u27s COVID-19 fear. Conclusion: We found that the combined effect of parents\u27 emotional well-being and parents\u27 management of children\u27s COVID-19 knowledge significantly mediated the positive relation between parenting stress and children\u27s COVID-19 fear. Based on our findings, once parents\u27 parenting stress is decreased and their well-being increases, parents may be more likely to provide children with developmentally appropriate and accurate COVID-19 information