# Interparental Conflict and Parenting in the Context of COVID-19

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER · 2022 · $641,787

## Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has historic implications on the health and wellbeing of families and
children. Starting in March of 2020, efforts to limit the spread of the virus has created
unprecedented challenges and stress to family functioning, including economic declines and job
loss, health risks, school closures and disruption to family routines, and increased domestic
violence and harsh parenting. Despite evidence indicating that COVID-19 increases rates of
interparental hostility and parent-child difficulties, little is known about the lasting effect of
COVID-19 on families, particularly how it may modulate the degree and nature of the
interdependencies between family relationships or subsystems in ways that modify family
functioning. Grounded in the theoretically rich conceptualizations of family systems and spillover
processes, this time-sensitive application seeks to explore how the extra-familial perturbations
associated with COVID-19 modify associations between interparental hostility and discord and
harsh, punitive parenting. This application builds on an existing dataset (Phase 1, N = 235
families) that was collected over a three-year period immediately prior to the onset of the
pandemic, and we propose to collect three additional waves of data post-onset of COVID-19.
The strength of this application involves the utilization of a quasi-experiment design with the
establishment of pre-COVID-baseline for family functioning, and both phases (six waves in total)
will utilize multi-method, multi-informant, and multi-level longitudinal design to assess ecological
contexts, family dynamics, parent and child characteristics, and parenting behaviors. This study
will elucidate how COVID-19 impacts spillover processes and may have enduring effects on
family functioning and advance new process-oriented approaches to understanding how
COVID-19 modulated spillover processes through mediating mechanism of parental
neurobiological and cognitive self-regulation. Furthermore, the present application will identify
the preexisting individual or ecological factors as well as COVID-19 related changes in family
functioning as risk or protective factors in the spillover processes. The results of this application
will have significant implications for understanding the ramifications of COVID-19 on family
functioning and have high potential to generate knowledge on targets for evidence-based
prevention programs.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10460596
- **Project number:** 5R01HD087761-07
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
- **Principal Investigator:** Patrick T Davies
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $641,787
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2016-08-05 → 2026-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10460596

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10460596, Interparental Conflict and Parenting in the Context of COVID-19 (5R01HD087761-07). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10460596. Licensed CC0.

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