A mother’s perspective: Perceived stress and parental self-efficacy during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic substantially affected the lives of mothers. This study seeks to investigate the stress that mothers experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic and their self-efficacy as parents in managing the impact of the disease. The study gathered longitudinal data from 603 German mothers (M_age = 40.5 years) with children requiring daily care during local lockdowns. The data were collected at two measurement points before and two measurement points during the pandemic. Using bivariate dual change score models, this study investigated the bidirectional relationship between both constructs, perceived stress and parental self-efficacy, by considering mothers’ socioeconomic background as well as COVID-19 related perceptions. The results reveal bidirectional paths between mothers’ perceived stress and parental self-efficacy. Mothers who evaluated the current situation as stressful appeared to be at risk of perceiving themselves as less effective in their parenting over time, but especially during the pandemic. In addition, mothers’ levels of education and their subjective poverty was predictive of a general change in their levels of stress and parental self-efficacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Bivariate dual change score model
• COVID-19
• longitudinal perspective
• mothers
• parental self-efficacy
• perceived stress

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2022.2120464

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/JB92M)

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/JB92M).

Notes

¹ It is necessary here to distinguish between perceived stress and parenting stress. While the former focuses on personal perceptions and evaluations of (daily) life and arises from different sources (family, work, COVID-19 situation), the latter refers to parents’ reactions arising from the attempt to adapt to the demands of parenthood (cf., Deater-Deckard, 2004, p. 6)