Story at a glance
- Many mothers faced a host of increased challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, including increased child care and a heightened threat of job loss.
- New research shows those who experienced the greatest changes also reported higher levels of stress.
- Those that experienced greater disruptions also tended to have higher incomes and education, and a majority were white.
The COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed many Americans’ lives, but new research shows mothers were especially susceptible to symptoms of traumatic stress following the crisis’ transformation of daily routines.
Higher pandemic-associated hardships, coping mechanisms and behavior changes were linked with greater significant symptoms of pandemic-associated traumatic stress in mothers from a diverse set of racial, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, researchers explained in JAMA Network Open.
More than 11,000 mothers completed a survey on the subject between April 2020 and August 2021. All mothers were participants of the National Institute of Health’s Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program.
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More than 8,000 mothers included in the study fell into the category that experienced major disruptions.
However, these women tended to have higher incomes, higher education and a majority of them were white, while those who reported fewer changes tended to have lower income, less education and were primarily Black and Native American. Data showed Hispanic women were fairly evenly split between the groups.
Researchers described these findings as somewhat unexpected, given COVID-19 has had a disproportionate effect on communities of color.
“It really came down to change and those mothers whose lives carried on much as they normally had, did not report as much stress,” said lead author Theresa Bastain in a statement. “It was the mothers who had big disruptions who reported the higher levels of stress.”
Bastain is an associate professor of clinical population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.
Lower income workers or essential workers may not have the privilege of working remotely or staying away from other household members, the authors added, meaning they could have experienced less change in daily life when the pandemic struck.
The study is the largest one to date investigating how mothers experienced the pandemic, according to the authors. Researchers wanted to study mothers specifically, as they took on a large share of child care and homeschooling responsibility during the pandemic. Mothers were also three times more likely than fathers to have lost their jobs in the pandemic, according to Pew data.
“We can’t conclude from this research that these mothers will have negative mental health outcomes from the pandemic, but it raises that concern,” said Bastain.
Mothers were asked about pandemic-related changes including whether they began to work remotely, spent less time with friends or changed their exercise routines. They were also queried about their experience with traumatic stress symptoms, which can include sleeplessness or startling easily.
Among the two groups analyzed — those that experienced high levels of pandemic-related disruption and those who reported much less change — mothers who reported the greatest change experienced more symptoms of traumatic stress. Social isolation and COVID-19’s effect on health care had the largest associations with increased stress symptoms, data showed.
Overall, a significant proportion of mothers experienced symptoms of acute stress disorder throughout the pandemic. Some who go on to develop the disorder may also develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
Apart from the pandemic, researchers stress the findings underscore the need for more research on the lasting health consequences of traumatic events as a whole.
“I think it shows that we need to think about traumatic experiences like natural disasters, pandemics or mass shootings more holistically,” Bastain said.
“There is a wide range of hardships that people experience from these events that we need to understand so that we can protect people from long term effects.”
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