Two Virginia Tech psychologists Charles Calderwood and Rosanna Breaux have been examining how the coronavirus pandemic has created challenges and has compounded work-related stress for parents of children with special needs.
Breaux is a clinical child psychologist who works with children with ADHD and Calderwood is an industrial organizational psychologist who focuses on work stress. There different workstreams came together during the pandemic. Both are working parents of children with special needs and this required them to navigate new environments of teleworking and virtual schooling at the same time.
For Calderwood and Breaux this led to an unexpected outlet for collaboration. Working together, they sought to understand how the COVID-19 situation created stress for parents raising children with special needs, including ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, depression, and other social, emotional, behavioural, and academic concerns.
By conducting a study, the two psychologists found that when parents worked in jobs that were more chronically stressful, the daily family challenges they faced at home had a greater impact on their emotional well-being and sense of work-life balance.
The researchers surveyed parents dealing with these circumstances in late 2020. They asked parents look at two types of challenges in their lives at the time: Work challenges like the time pressure of upcoming deadlines, and family challenges such as a child’s academic, emotional, or behavioural difficulties, including conflict like arguments between kids and parents.
In particular, the researchers wanted to know how these short-term challenges interacted with long-term stressors parents faced at work. This was of interest since chronic work stress can involve emotionally draining work, frequent interactions with difficult people, or the feeling of never having enough time to meet one’s goals. That build-up of stress could be analogous to that of anxiety or depression.
Going forwards, both Calderwood and Breaux think there are lessons that can be drawn from these findings intended to help organizations better support employees in unprecedented, difficult contexts such as COVID-19. The researchers contend their is value in pausing to look back and unpack sources of stress during that moment in the pandemic, particularly for employers.
This understanding should also lead to proactive steps to try to support employee well-being and to make jobs less chronically stressful.
The research and recommendations have been published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. The research is titled “When daily challenges become too much during COVID-19: Implications of family and work demands for work–life balance among parents of children with special needs.”
