Parent and child adjustment dual trajectories at the beginning of the COVID-19 syndemic.

Children and their families have been significantly impacted by the unfolding of the COVID-19 syndemic. We sought to identify (1) groups of families with distinct profiles of joint trajectories of parental anxiety and child emotional distress and (2) protective and risk factors associated with these dual-trajectory profiles. A sample of 488 parents (65% White; 77% mothers) with 3- to 8-year-old children (MAge  = 5.04, SDAge  = 1.59) was followed from late March to early July in 2020. Survey data on parent (i.e., anxiety symptoms) and child (i.e., emotional distress) adjustment were collected at three time points. Using multivariate growth mixture modeling, we identified one group with low parental anxiety and child emotional distress (42.7%) and three other distinct groups with varying risk levels among parents and/or children. We also identified protective (e.g., positive parenting) and risk (e.g., child negative affect, negative parenting, perceived stress with racism) factors in predicting parent and child adjustment. It can be concluded that, overall, our sample (mostly middle- and high-socioeconomic status families) demonstrated family resilience amid COVID-19, consistent with prior disaster coping literature. At the same time, our findings also indicated the need to identify at-risk families and modifiable factors for post-disaster public health interventions.

Underemployment and mental health: A longitudinal study.

Research has established that certain forms of underemployment relate to poorer mental health, but no studies have examined which components of underemployment are uniquely related to mental health over time. To address this gap in the literature, we longitudinally examined how multiple subjective underemployment constructs (i.e., underpayment, status, involuntary temporary work, field, poverty-wage employment, involuntary part-time work, and overqualification) predicted symptoms of distress in a large sample of working adults in four waves over 9 months. We also identified group differences in underemployment. Results revealed that involuntary part-time work, involuntary temporary work, and poverty-wage employment fluctuated with distress over the course of the study, but only involuntary temporary work predicted greater symptoms of distress over time. Group differences also revealed that gender, age, level of education, and subjective social class predicted various forms of subjective underemployment. Findings encourage researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to consider involuntary temporary work as potentially harmful to mental health and inform the future examination of mental health inequities for marginalized groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).