Home Alone: The Pandemic Is Overloading Single-parent Families
By: Uoregon Ctn
Tags: Covid 19, Early Child Development, Rapid Ec Project, Health Data, Single Parent Family

Background

During the pandemic, we have all have been experiencing challenges from social isolation, balancing work and personal life, and feeling uncertain about our health and safety. Many have also lost work or had their incomes reduced. For those with families, the pandemic has been especially difficult. Figuring out how to work in the absence of child care was particularly difficult in the early months of the pandemic, when most providers were shut down. Even where it is now available, the costs of childcare have increased by an estimated 47%, due to reduced enrollment and increased costs of PPE and cleaning supplies. This has made child care less affordable, especially for those on limited budgets.

Rates of family conflict have also increased during the pandemic (although, our survey also finds parents report deriving more emotional support from their children now as compared to before the pandemic). Managing children’s online learning is another challenge for families, especially for those with elementary school-age children in addition to younger children. We have found that parents are shouldering the vast majority of the burden of supporting their children’s education on top of trying to work.

These challenges are amplified in many single-parent families. Although single parent households are as much defined by their diversity as their similarities, many have fewer financial resources as a result of being single wage-earners and fewer emotional and social supports.

In this week’s posting we focus on the particular complexities that single-parent households with young children are facing during the pandemic.

The proportion of single-parent families in the United States has been increasing steadily in recent decades.

In 2019 the US Census estimated that over 5 million children age 5 and under in this country live in a single parent household. Single parent households exist in large numbers across the economic spectrum, and among all racial and ethnic groups. The majority of single parents are women, who have, in general, been more negatively impacted by the pandemic than men in terms of income and employment.

Given the many ways that we have seen the pandemic challenge households with young children, we were interested in whether single parent households are experiencing more difficulties during the pandemic than other families, and if so in what areas of life. Although there are anecdotal reports of such difficulties in the media, the high quality data from our survey help provide a fuller picture of this important issue.

What do the survey data show?[1]

1. Single parents are experiencing higher levels of emotional distress. We computed a composite score of parental distress that includes parent’s report of their own levels of anxiety, depression, stress, and loneliness. We find that the average level of distress for single parents — across the entire span of the survey, dating back to early April — is significantly higher than for other families.

This is true across all of the domains that comprise our emotional distress composite measure: anxiety, depression, stress, and loneliness.