Visiting parents in times of COVID-19: The impact of parent-adult child contacts on the psychological health of the elderly.
Econ Hum Biol
; 46: 101152, 2022 08.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-35700656
ABSTRACT
Using the 8th wave of the SHARE and the SHARE Corona Survey, we investigated whether the disruption of parent-adult child contacts due to social distancing restrictions increased the symptoms of depression among old age individuals during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. We model the relationship between the disruption of parent-adult child contacts and the mental health of the elderly using a recursive simultaneous equation model for binary variables. Our findings show that the likelihood of disruption of parent-adult child contacts was higher with adult children who do not live with or close to their parents (i.e., in the same household or in the same building) for whom contact disruption increases about 15 %. The duration of restrictions to movement and lockdowns also has a positive and significant effect on parent-child contact disruption an additional week of lockdown significantly increases the probability of parent-child contact disruption, by about 1.5 %. The interventions deemed essential to reduce the spread of the pandemic, such as the "stay-at-home" order, necessarily disrupted personal parent-child contacts and the social processes that facilitate psychological well-being, increasing the probability of suffering from a deepening depressed mood by about 17 % for elderly parents.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
COVID-19
Type of study:
Prognostic_studies
Limits:
Adult
/
Aged
/
Humans
Language:
En
Journal:
Econ Hum Biol
Journal subject:
BIOLOGIA
/
CIENCIAS SOCIAIS
Year:
2022
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Italia