How Long Can the Levee Hold?
What’s new? This is the RAPID-EC Project Team’s first post on emotional support during the pandemic and how it is affecting families.
Executive Summary
In this week’s posting we examine caregivers’ experiences of emotional support in the context of the difficulties households with young children are facing during the pandemic. Extensive prior research shows that emotional support can provide a strong buffer against the effects of stress in children and families. We were interested in the extent to which emotional support has been helping families cope since the onset of the pandemic. This topic is especially critical at this moment, as more and more households with young children face difficulties paying for basic needs in the absence of a congressional stimulus package; and as we head into fall with coronavirus infections still not under control in many regions of the US.
Here are a number of key findings from our RAPID survey:
Families report having less emotional support than they did prior to the pandemic.
The nature of emotional support is changing for many households. Caregivers rely less on friends and co-workers for support and instead turn to family members (including spouses/partners, grandparents, and children) and others in the immediate geographical vicinity (e.g., neighbors).
Emotional support continues to be an important buffer against stress. Specifically, emotional supports interrupt the chain reaction from material hardship to child emotional distress. In particular, we find that:
In families with higher levels of emotional support, material hardship doesn’t lead to increases in caregiver distress, and caregiver distress doesn’t negatively impact children’s well-being.
In contrast, in families with lower levels of emotional support, we continue to see that material hardship leads to increase caregiver distress over time, which predicts child emotional difficulties.
Our results demonstrate the importance of caregiver emotional support during these challenging times, and the need for efforts that help to strengthen such supports.
However, even the strongest buffers are not infallible in the face of ongoing (and increasing) stress. In light of the devastating effects on households with young children of the expiration of CARES Act financial relief and the end of the moratorium on evictions, it is of the utmost importance that Congressional, state, and local government leaders to enact policies that ensure basic needs for food and shelter will be met among households with young children.
Background
In prior postings, we described the impact that not having enough money to pay for food, housing, and utilities is having on households with young children during the pandemic. Not being unable to provide for family members’ basic needs (i.e., material hardship) is an undeniably highly stressful experience for parents and other caregivers. We found that 20% of the households in our nationally representative sample were experiencing material hardship.
Notably, we documented these rates of material hardship in mid-July, before the CARES Act provisions for supplemental unemployment funds expired. Extensive media coverage has described the devastating effects that the loss of this CARES Act benefit is now having on American households. To paraphrase one report, we are now moving as a nation from “crisis to catastrophe.” This situation has only become more dire this week because it coincides with the end of the federal moratorium on evictions, which places as many as 30–40 million individuals in the US at risk for becoming homeless in the coming months.
In our prior report, we reported on the effects of not being able to pay for basic needs, which increases young children’s emotional distress over time. We also showed that a key mechanism linking material hardship to children’s difficulties is through negative impacts on caregiver well-being.
In other words, not being able to pay for basic needs is clearly upsetting to caregivers of young children, and caregiver distress is ultimately having a negative effect on how children are doing.
We expressed concern about the immediate and long-term impact of this so-called chain reaction of hardship because so much is known about the effects of chronic stress on children’s psychological, emotional, physical, and neurobiological development.
Given the high level of material hardship already noted with the prior CARES ACT $600/week unemployment payments, it is hard to imagine that any decrease in those payments (as some national policy makers are advocating) will not result in an increase in families suffering significant hardship. It is also clear that an actual moratorium on evictions is needed, as opposed to a request that human services considers extending such a moratorium. In addition to these concerns, it important to determine the extent to which emotional support reported by caregivers is helping to mitigate the effects of material hardship during the pandemic.
Emotional support has long been known to be a protective factor against the effects of stress. This includes having friends, family, and others who you can lean on during hard times. We were interested in examining how such support is changing during the pandemic. We wanted to know whether emotional support interrupts the chain reaction from material hardship to caregiver distress to child emotional difficulties. Our data suggest that, although the nature of emotional support is changing, it is still helping households with young children manage during this time.
How is emotional support changing during the pandemic?
Survey respondents were asked what kind of support was available to them and whom they turned to for social support in the last week and during a typical week prior to COVID-19. Not surprisingly, in the context of social distancing and changes in work and childcare, many caregivers are reporting diminished support during the pandemic. In particular, our data show that 63% of caregivers say they have lost emotional support since the start of the pandemic, whereas only 23% say they have gained emotional support.
Perhaps more interesting, the nature of emotional support appears to have changed:
There have been large decreases in percentages of caregivers who report being able to rely on friends (35%) and co-workers (30%) for emotional support.
In contrast, we observe increases in percentages of caregivers relying on a child, grandparent, or neighbor for support, albeit in smaller numbers (10%, 7%, and 7%, respectively).
Notably, the percentages of caregivers who are not single parents reporting that they rely on a spouse/partner for emotional support is high and remains virtually unchanged from before the pandemic (87%) to now (89%).
These data suggest a possible “drawing inward” in households with young children, with greater reliance on individuals in one’s immediate vicinity for support. The decreased reliance on friends and co-workers for support is not surprising in light of the number of lost jobs and the shift to remote working, as well as the impact of social distancing.
We also find caregivers’ increased reliance on their own children for emotional support particularly intriguing. Our data do not allow us to determine what sort of support children are providing, but we are examining this topic in our next survey.
Coming Soon: What social support are children providing to their caregivers?
Overall, these results may foreshadow transitory — or perhaps more fundamental — cultural shifts in the social networks of American families in terms of who caregivers rely on for emotional support. These are issues that will be important to examine moving forward — not only for households with young children but in the general population as well.
Emotional support interrupts the “chain reaction of material hardship”
One of our main goals in including questions about emotional support in the RAPID survey was to consider the extent to which these supports help families cope with the challenges of the pandemic. We were especially interested whether emotional support buffers children from the negative effects of material hardship that so many families are experiencing.
In order to examine this issue, we revisited the “chain reaction of material hardship” analyses that we described in prior postings. Specifically, we split our sample into two groups — those with higher and lower levels of emotional support, and examined the associations between difficulty paying for basic needs (food, housing, utilities, etc), caregiver distress, and child emotional difficulties.
In the low emotional support group, we once again found evidence for the chain reaction: experiences of material hardship over time lead to increased caregiver distress, which in turn predicts child emotional difficulties.
In the high-emotional support group, however, we did not observe this chain of events. Instead, there was no association between material hardship and subsequent caregiver distress or child emotional difficulties over time.
What are the implications of these findings?
Even during the pandemic, emotional support clearly continues to buffer households with young children from the effects of stress resulting from material hardship even during the uncertainty and numerous challenges posed by the pandemic. As such, maintaining these connections for all individuals as we move into the fall and winter months will remain essential.
But no buffer against hard times is infallible.
Much like long term erosion or a high intensity storm can breach a levee, the ongoing effects of financial hardship will disrupt families’ ability to maintain strong bonds and social networks. The longer caregivers are uncertain about their ability to feed their family, keep a roof over their head, and keep the electricity on, the less likely that emotional supports will prevent these experiences from negatively affecting caregivers or children.
For this reason, passing new federal legislation that targets material hardship via financial relief and protection against evictions must be the top priority. This is an especially critical issue in this moment when CARES Act financial and housing relief has expired and Congressional negotiations for subsequent aid have broken down. The ranks of households experiencing material hardship, hunger, and homelessness — including those with infants and young children — are swelling dramatically and will continue to increase in the absence of action. Thus, a dual focus on enacting measures that prevent or reduce material hardship combined with efforts to promote and enhance emotional supports is absolutely essential to insure the wellbeing of young children during the pandemic.
Policy makers and community leaders must also fund access to technology (including computers and high speed internet) that allow for access to social programs that help to bolster emotional support, particularly for those who are both isolated and struggling with difficulties paying for basic needs. Our data show that in the absence of such measures, children living in these households will be exposed to the type of chronic ongoing stress that is known to have long-term effects on well-being.
Recommendations
Congressional lawmakers must immediately enact a new stimulus package that goes beyond the minimal supports in the President’s executive orders.
Federal, state, and local officials must mandate and implement evidence-based public health measures (social distancing, wearing masks, testing) to control and contain the spread of the virus.
Supplemental funding for social programs that promote emotional support to caregivers with young children, and for technology to access such programs, must be provided.
Programs to support caregivers with young children that include providing emotional support must continue to develop and implement innovative strategies to help those in need. For example, home visitation programs and other in-person services that have been impacted by the pandemic need to identify effective approaches to connecting with caregivers and children.
Community leaders, religious groups, and other public and private organizations must provide outreach to families in need.
We must reduce barriers to accessing services that provide emotional support to high risk groups in which there may be lower levels of emotional support (e.g., households in which a child has a disability, single parent households, immigrant families, rural families).
Additional readings
“A Hardship Chain Reaction,” Medium.
“Social Support Can Buffer against Stress and Shape Brain Activity,” AJOB neuroscience.
“Without $600 Weekly Benefit, Unemployed Face Bleak Choices,” New York Times.
“Millions of Evictions a Sharper Threat as Government Support Ends,” New York Times.
“The COVID-19 Eviction Crisis: An Estimated 30–40 Million People in America Are at Risk,” National Low Income Housing Coalition.
About the project
When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged last winter, there were over 24 million children age five and under living in the United States. This period of early childhood is a critical window that sets the stage for health and well-being across the lifespan. As such, it is essential during the current health and economic crisis to listen to the voices of households with young children.
The weekly survey of households with children age five and under launched on April 6, 2020. Since then, we have been gathering weekly data about child and adult emotional well-being, financial and work circumstances, availability of healthcare, and access to child care/early childhood education.
We will continue to report on these issues as we learn more from each new weekly survey. We will also be producing policy briefs that make concrete recommendations about how to address the challenges we are seeing emerge from the family surveys.
Our goal is to use what we are hearing from families to improve the well-being of all households with young children, during the pandemic and beyond.
Suggested citation
Center for Translational Neuroscience (2020, August 12). How Long Can the Levee Hold? Medium. https://medium.com/rapid-ec-project/how-long-can-the-levee-hold-2a2cd0779914