key: cord-0973500-b9jg14vs
authors: Hiraoka, Daiki; Tomoda, Akemi
title: The Relationship Between Parenting Stress and School Closures due to the COVID‐19 Pandemic
date: 2020-06-17
journal: Psychiatry Clin Neurosci
DOI: 10.1111/pcn.13088
sha: 89d16bcfdddd4742b9e93c4b6c7201c84d02f24f
doc_id: 973500
cord_uid: b9jg14vs

nan

The COVID-19 started to spread rapidly throughout the world. There is an increased risk of child maltreatment and domestic violence due to the spread of COVID-19. 1, 2 One reason for this is that school closures force children to stay at home for longer durations, which may increase parenting stress. In Japan, all schools nationwide were temporarily closed starting on March 2 nd , 2020. Many children had remained home at least until the end of April 2020. The purpose of this study was to quantify parenting stress, and to understand the qualitative structure of parenting stress through textual analysis during this unprecedented situation.

The sample included three hundred and fifty-three parents aged 23-58 years (M = 37.60, SD = 6.11; 78 males, 273 females, and two were unknown). The mean age of the eldest child was 8.04 years (SD = 4.62, Range = 0-18 years), and the mean age of the youngest child was 6.11 years (SD = 4.66, Range = 0-18 years), respectively. All information gathered was processed anonymously. The study protocol and all procedures were approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Fukui, Japan (Assurance # FU-20200007). The survey was conducted entirely on the web between April 29-30th, 2020. All participants were recruited using Crowdworks (a crowdsourcing service in Japan). Participants saw the advertisement and applied to participate using the crowdsourcing service. We then sent the survey questionnaire form to participants who met the requirements for participation (living with their children aged 0-18 who were under This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. school closure). Informed consent for participation was obtained from all participants prior to starting the survey.

The short form of the Parenting Stress Index (PSI-SF) 3 was used to measure parenting stress; this is composed of 36 items with a Likert-type answer format of five options. We adapted a bifactorial structure (the Parental Distress subscale and the Childrearing Stress subscale) based on a recent validation study. 4 Participants were asked to complete the PSI-SF twice. First, the participants answered the PSI-SF without any particular instructions. Following completion, they were then asked to complete the PSI-SF Participants were asked to freely describe what types of stress they felt about parenting. In addition to the above questions, participants were asked to describe what they were doing or devising to relieve the parenting stress mentioned above. Co-occurrence network analyses 5 were conducted for both questions. First, 626 words were extracted regarding parenting stress. A co-occurrence network analysis was performed using the most common 30 words that appeared. The results are visually depicted in S. Figure 1 . Next, 540 words were extracted from the second open-ended question regarding methods of relieving parenting stress. A co-occurrence network analysis was conducted using the 30 most common words. S. Figure 2 visually depicts the co-occurrence network.

In conclusion, we found that there was a significant increase in parenting stress, as reported on the PSI-SF. One strength of this study is that it allows for future longitudinal and comparative studies between different regions to assess parenting stress using a globally used scale. The results demonstrated by the PSI-SF in this study will serve as a meaningful comparator for future fundamental research on this topic. The inclusion of This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

qualitative descriptive data allowed us to understand specific aspects of parenting stressors.

Specifically addressing these issues through local and national policies may help in relieving parenting stress during this pandemic. In addition, we were able to obtain ideas about effective coping methods that could be practiced at individual and household levels.

Disseminating these strategies is expected to increase resilience to parenting stress in households during this time. However, it is possible that some families may find it difficult to implement such solutions due to their individual circumstances. These families will need additional support from local governments and the private sector.

One of the limitations of this study is that the PSI rating before the school closure was obtained using a retrospective method. Most of the participants that completed this survey, however, agreed to participate in a subsequent survey. In the future, we plan to conduct this study longitudinally. We believe that these efforts will help parents cope with stress during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.