COVID-19 distress, negative parenting, and child behavioral problems: The moderating role of parent adverse childhood experiences.

BACKGROUND: Heightened familial stress and distress during the COVID-19 pandemic may lead to increased negative parenting practices, particularly for parents with substantial adverse childhood experiences (ACES). OBJECTIVE: To determine whether families' COVID-19-related distress is associated with young children's emotional/behavioral functioning via negative parenting, and whether these relationships vary based on parents' ACEs. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: Participants were 267 parents of children ages 1.5-5 years recruited from five primary care sites across the United States. METHODS: Participants completed internet questionnaires including measures of demographics, parent ACES, negative parenting, parent mental health, and COVID-19 distress. We used regression analyses to test a moderated mediation model in which the relationship between COVID-19 distress and child emotional/behavioral problems is mediated by negative parenting, and both the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 distress on child emotional/behavioral problems is moderated by parents' ACEs. RESULTS: Negative parenting significantly mediated the relationship between COVID-19 distress and child emotional/behavioral problems (indirect effect ß = 0.07). Parents' ACEs moderated the associations between COVID-19 distress and both negative parenting and child emotional/behavioral problems, such that each relationship was stronger in the context of higher parental ACEs. The model accounted for 42% of the variance in child emotional/behavioral problems. CONCLUSIONS: Findings have implications for managing risk and promoting well-being in young children during periods of significant stress and routine disruption. This study advances understanding of factors influencing negative outcomes in children during the pandemic's acute phase and may have implications for the development of targeted interventions to improve families' adjustment in the future.

Parents' Preferences for Behavioral Services in Primary Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

OBJECTIVE: Pediatric primary care is an ideal setting to provide behavioral health services to young children and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it is unclear how the pandemic altered parents' priorities and preferences to obtain behavioral services in this setting. METHOD: Between July 2020 and January 2021, 301 parents of young children in 5 pediatric sites across the United States completed survey measures on their preferences for behavioral topics and service delivery methods in primary care. The current sample was compared with a previous sample of parents (n = 396) who completed the same measures in 2018. RESULTS: Child self-calming was the only behavioral topic that was rated as significantly more important in the pandemic cohort in comparison with the prepandemic cohort. The pandemic cohort also reported significantly more interest in using certain media resources (e.g., mobile apps and videos) as a delivery method and less interest in group classes/seminars. After controlling for demographic differences between the samples, there was an increased preference for multimedia resources overall in the pandemic cohort, as well as a decreased preference for usual care. CONCLUSION: Parents generally endorse similar priorities for behavioral topics in primary care during the pandemic as they did before the pandemic. However, there is a clear preference for more remote and media-based services during the pandemic. Pediatric practices may consider augmenting behavioral health services with multimedia resources during and after the COVID-19 pandemic to meet parents' needs.

Exploring the effectiveness of the TSR-based protein 3-D structural comparison method for protein clustering, and structural motif identification and discovery of protein kinases, hydrolases, and SARS-CoV-2's protein via the application of amino acid grouping.

Development of protein 3-D structural comparison methods is essential for understanding protein functions. Some amino acids share structural similarities while others vary considerably. These structures determine the chemical and physical properties of amino acids. Grouping amino acids with similar structures potentially improves the ability to identify structurally conserved regions and increases the global structural similarity between proteins. We systematically studied the effects of amino acid grouping on the numbers of Specific/specific, Common/common, and statistically different keys to achieve a better understanding of protein structure relations. Common keys represent substructures found in all types of proteins and Specific keys represent substructures exclusively belonging to a certain type of proteins in a data set. Our results show that applying amino acid grouping to the Triangular Spatial Relationship (TSR)-based method, while computing structural similarity among proteins, improves the accuracy of protein clustering in certain cases. In addition, applying amino acid grouping facilitates the process of identification or discovery of conserved structural motifs. The results from the principal component analysis (PCA) demonstrate that applying amino acid grouping captures slightly more structural variation than when amino acid grouping is not used, indicating that amino acid grouping reduces structure diversity as predicted. The TSR-based method uniquely identifies and discovers binding sites for drugs or interacting proteins. The binding sites of nsp16 of SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV that we have defined will aid future antiviral drug design for improving therapeutic outcome. This approach for incorporating the amino acid grouping feature into our structural comparison method is promising and provides a deeper insight into understanding of structural relations of proteins.