Leisure and psychosocial functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring data from adolescents and parents of adolescents

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people experienced life disruptions affecting leisure activities, such as discontinuation of after-school activities for adolescents and changes in the amount of leisure time available for parents. Because leisure activities have previously been associated with psychosocial functioning, the present study examined leisure behaviors and psychosocial functioning among 158 parents/guardians of adolescents and 116 of their children during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Results indicated that time spent engaging with TV, video games, and social media during the pandemic was associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms and anxiety for both parents and adolescents. Retrospective reports indicating decreased leisure time socialization were also associated with depressive symptoms during the pandemic in both groups. These results highlight the importance of leisure for both adolescents and parents of adolescents and its capacity to support or undermine psychosocial functioning in challenging times.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• recreation; adolescents, parents, psychosocial functioning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics statement

The Pennsylvania State University Institutional Review Board approved this study (protocol number 00015003). All participants provided consent/assent; parental consent was obtained for adolescents.

Notes

1 There is some variation in the literature with regard to how mental health, mental illness, and distress are understood in relation to each other. Payton (2009) has shown that there is more to mental health than absence of distress and dysfunction and that these factors should be understood as discrete phenomena rather than as a continuum of related experiences. We therefore use the term psychosocial functioning to encompass indicators of well-being (e.g., emotional support) and indicators of distress/disorder (e.g., symptoms of depression and anxiety).

2 Because our sample consists of parents/guardians and their adolescent children, we tested whether multilevel models were necessary to account for the nested data structure. Likelihood ratio test results indicated that multilevel models did not better fit the data for models of depression and emotional support. Although multilevel models were a better fit for generalized anxiety disorder, the conclusions were substantively the same, so we report the single-level models here for parsimony.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Pennsylvania State University College of Health and Human Development. The study was also supported by NIH /NCATS Grant #UL1TR000127 and UL1TR002014 in its use of the REDCap survey platform.