Changes in Psychological Distress in Children With Physical Illness and Their Parents During the COVID‐19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Background Parents and their children with chronic physical illness (CPI) are often predisposed to experiencing psychopathology, a phenomenon, which may be exacerbated during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Objective This study modelled trajectories of psychological distress experienced by children with CPI and their parents before and during COVID‐19. Methods Overall, 134 parent–child dyads enrolled in an ongoing cohort study, Multimorbidity in Children and Youth across the Life‐course study, participated in this COVID‐19 substudy. Data were collected at three time‐points: pre‐pandemic (Dec 19–Mar 20) and two intrapandemic periods (Dec 20–Mar 21 and Jun 22–Oct 22) in Ontario, Canada. Parents reported on symptoms psychological distress they and their children experienced, using the Kessler‐6. Linear mixed‐effects modelling was used to estimate trajectories of psychological distress over time. Results Parents of children with CPI experienced increased psychological distress from pre‐pandemic to intrapandemic 2021, which declined slightly by intrapandemic 2022 (B linear = 4.64, p < 0.001; B quadratic = −1.79, p < 0.001), and this rate of change over time was influenced by parent stress. Psychological distress was lower among parents of older children. Children experienced increasing psychological distress from pre‐pandemic to intrapandemic 2022 (B linear = 1.20, p < 0.001). Elevated child psychological distress was associated with the presence of mental illness, older age, greater disability, younger parent age, and higher household income. Conclusions Children with CPI and their parents experienced elevated psychological distress during COVID‐19. Understanding the course of psychological distress for vulnerable children and their families is crucial to informing healthcare strategies that foster mental well‐being and preparedness for future global crises.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".