Does perceived privilege act as a resiliency factor for children and parents during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted typical family functioning, and pre-existing vulnerabilities (like low income) can impact family functioning via risk and resilience models (Prime et al., 2020). Additionally, COVID-19 saw an increase in children’s problematic media use (PMU; media use behaviors that lead to dysfunction in at least one domain, Domoff et al., 2020). Could parents’ perceived or actual privilege confer any benefits in shielding them and their families from negative pandemic impacts? The present study aims to identify how perceived privilege (meaning how individuals perceive their resources compared to others) — during the COVID-19 pandemic is related to parent/child stress and PMU.
Methods: Our sample included 469 parents of children aged 1.58-13.00 years (mean age = 5.44, SD = 2.40; 86.8 % non-Hispanic White) living primarily in the Twin Cities, MN. Online survey data was collected between May and June 2020. Perceived privilege was measured via a one-item scale that asked if the parent felt like they had more or less access to resources than others. Child distress was measured via one item, parent distress was assessed via the PHQ-4 (Kroenke et al., 2009), and problematic media was assessed via a 9-item measure (Domoff et al., 2019). We conducted multiple linear regressions predicting parent/child distress and PMU with social desirability and child age as covariates.
Results: Perceived privilege was not significantly related to parent/child stress or child PMU. However, when replacing perceived privilege with income as a measure of actual privilege, higher income was associated with lower parent distress (B = -.14, p < .01).
Conclusion: During the COVID-19 pandemic, economic privilege (income) was associated with lower parent distress, while perceived privilege was not related to any substantive variables. Future research should aim to conduct these analyses with more economically and racially diverse samples, and measure privilege more reliably.