Mothers who experienced most changes during pandemic more likely to suffer traumatic stress: study

By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter Thursday, December 22, 2022

A new study analyzed the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on mothers, finding those who experienced the most significant change to their daily routines were more likely to say they suffered from traumatic stress. 

The study, published Friday by JAMA Network Open, surveyed more than 11,400 mothers between April 2020 and August 2021. All of the mothers involved in the study were participants of the National Institute of Health's Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program. The program supports longitudinal studies based on mothers and their children. 

More than 8,000 mothers in the survey fell into the group that experienced a high level of change to their routines, while the second group, which experienced "low change," involved more than 3,000 mothers. 

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In the group experiencing the highest levels of change, the mothers also had higher education and income. On average, the mothers in this category reported more pandemic-related stress symptoms. 

According to the study, they "reported greater life disruptions, social isolation, and coping behaviors to mitigate the effects of the pandemic and changes to their health behavior routines."

The mothers reporting fewer changes tended to have lower income, less education and included a higher proportion of black and Native Americans. Hispanic women were fairly split among the two categories, according to the survey.  

"Across both clusters, higher pandemic-associated hardships, coping mechanisms, and behavior changes were associated with higher PTS, and these associations were greater in the low change cluster," the study noted.

In a Friday statement, the study's lead author, Theresa Bastain, said that researchers examined the pandemic's impact on mothers, as many experienced job losses or found themselves balancing childcare and homeschooling responsibilities. 

Bastain is an associate professor of clinical population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.

"It really came down to change, and those mothers whose lives carried on much as they normally had, did not report as much stress," Bastain said. "It was the mothers who had big disruptions who reported the higher levels of stress." 

The study's lead author believes that the survey's results show that many need to think about traumatic experiences like pandemics, mass shootings or natural disasters more holistically. 

"There is a wide range of hardships that people experience from these events that we need to understand so that we can protect people from long-term effects," she said.

In a Wednesday statement to The Christian Post, Dr. Sharen Ford, director of foster care and adoption for the Christian organization Focus on the Family, acknowledged that life during the pandemic was "stressful for all women." 

"When Christians and churches step in to provide needed supports and services, these individuals can let go of some of those weights," she wrote. "Having access to a caring and nurturing community of believers that want to pour into women makes it between barely surviving and thriving."

Ford noted that the pandemic affected women of all cultures and socio-economic backgrounds, stating that the study "emphasizes the need for all women to have access to supports and services to help them so the impacts of stressors can be reduced."

As The Christian Post reported, a 2020 analysis conducted by Great Place to Work and healthcare start-up Maven found that an estimated 2.35 million working mothers in the U.S. suffered from burnout during the start of COVID-19. The feelings of burnout were mostly due to unequal demands of home and work, according to the study. 

The analysis assessed 226,000 working mothers and 204,000 working fathers at over 1,200 U.S. companies. Participants responded to 60 questions through Great Place to Work's Trust Index survey.

Another survey conducted by the business networking site LinkedIn found that working women experienced higher levels of stress than men, even though both sexes reported similar pressures. The study assessed nearly 5,000 members on the site between July 31 and Aug. 13 last year.

Compared to 61% of working men, 74% of women said they felt "very or somewhat stressed" for work-related reasons. Forty percent of working women cited "not having enough time in the day to get everything done" as one of their top stress factors, versus just 35% of male respondents.