Parent-Child Relationships, Digital Media Use and Parents' Well-Being during COVID-19 Home Confinement: The Role of Family Resilience

Research has provided substantial evidence on the role of parents' well-being in the quality of parent-child relationships and children's adjustment. Parents' stress and parental couple conflict have been linked to children's adverse developmental outcomes. However, little is known about the factors that affect parents' well-being when coping with multiple stressors such as those brought by the recent COVID-19 global pandemic. Our study intended to examine the predictors of parental well-being by looking at the contextual factors of COVID-19 home confinement, i.e., the use of digital media and parents' domestic workload, and family resilience in two countries: Ireland and Italy. Additionally, the age and number of children were controlled as potential variables impacting parents' well-being. A three-step hierarchical regression analysis was applied. The results showed that family resilience was a very strong predictor of parents' well-being after controlling for any other variable. Parental couples' conflict over the use of technology predicted lower levels of parents' well-being, while, notably, parent child-conflict and domestic workload were not associated with parents' well-being. Additionally, the age of children did play a role: the higher the mean age of children in the family the better the parents' well-being. The findings are discussed in the light of cross-country differences and their implications for research and practice.