Resilience and Social Support as Resources for Kinship Caregivers Who are Coping with COVID-19

ABSTRACT

This study explored the roles of social support and resilience in understanding the impact of barriers to needed services as well as the impact of COVID-19 on kinship caregivers’ efforts to care for themselves. Based upon a sample of 135 kinship caregivers, analyses suggested that social support and resilience mediated barriers to service – self-care relationships as well as impact of COVID-19 – self-care relationships, subject to whether overall impact or physical/mental health-relational impact was considered. These findings help to understand why some kinship caregivers are more adept at meeting their own self-care needs than are others during COVID-19 and have implications for enhancing resilience and social support among kinship caregivers in the face of COVID-19.

KEYWORDS:

• Kinship care
• resilience
• social support
• grandparents

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Contribution to the Field

This paper identifies the key roles that personal resilience and social support play in impacting kinship caregivers’ response to the pandemic. It moreover contextualizes not only COVID-19 impact but also self-care in understanding relationships between both barriers to service and virus impact on self-care as a response to the COVID-19 lockdown. Findings have implications for capitalizing on the strengths that kinship caregivers bring in coping with the pandemic.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the William Penn Foundation.