Parental Coping, Affective Symptoms, and Affective Reactions to Parenting Stress in Parents of Adolescents During COVID-19.

It is important to improve understanding of how parenting stress and coping strategies may be associated. Various coping strategies have been associated with different psychosocial outcomes, including anxiety and depression. Gender differences in coping between women and men may contribute to women reporting higher levels of psychological distress, depression, and anxiety. However, there is a lack of research on gender differences in stress responses and coping behaviors among parents in response to the stress of parenting adolescents, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study aimed to address this gap in the literature by recruiting 396 parents (200 mothers and 196 fathers) of adolescents aged 12 to 16 years during the COVID-19 pandemic (November to December, 2021). Participants completed self-report measures and engaged in a standardized audio vignette paradigm to evaluate emotional responses to stress-inducing scenarios involving their adolescent children. Secondary control coping and affective symptoms were associated with maternal emotional reactions to the standardized audio vignettes, while paternal affective symptoms and secondary control coping were associated with anxious responses to the audio vignettes. These findings provide preliminary evidence that it may be important to promote secondary control coping, and to target parental affective symptoms in order to improve parent affective responses to difficult interactions with offspring.