Prospective associations between pandemic-related adversity, harsh parenting, and the development of prosociality across middle to late childhood.

Parenting behaviors and children's prosociality (i.e., voluntary behaviors intended to benefit others) are linked across development. Contextual risk and environmental stressors may undermine parenting behaviors known to promote children's prosocial behavior. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique context in which to examine how stress and contextual risk disrupt parenting practices and the development of children's prosociality over time. To explore the associations between pandemic-related adversity, parenting practices, and child prosocial behavior, we used survey data from 303 families (child Mage = 6.43; 51.4% female, 48.6% male; 65.7% White) who participated in a three-wave longitudinal study during the first year of the pandemic. Families were recruited from two northeastern cities in the United States. Growth mixture modeling identified two groups of parents who varied in their experience of pandemic-related adversity. The high-adversity group reported significantly more symptoms of depression and anxiety, parental burnout, and pandemic-related worries than the low-adversity group. At baseline, parents in the high-adversity group reported harsher parenting and perceived less prosocial behavior in their children. Across the full sample, there were no significant changes in harsh parenting and parental perceptions of child's prosociality across the first year of the pandemic. However, within the high-adversity group, increases in harsh parenting were related to reductions in children's prosociality over time. Results are interpreted in the context of family systems theory and contribute to our understanding of the links between parenting and children's prosociality and patterns of risk and resilience in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).