The scientists are going to figure it out: Parent explanations in times of pandemic uncertainty

How do parents across cultures explain illness transmission, especially when uncertain? We systematically explored parents’ explanations of the origins, spread, and mitigations of COVID-19 to children, and potential relation to parent-reported increases in children’s anxiety-related behaviors. Parents in Northern Ireland, USA, and Colombia completed a Prompted Explanation Task responding to four questions as if speaking to their child, and reported children’s anxiety-related behaviors. In Northern Ireland, mechanistic explanations were most common. As child age increased, parents were more likely to reference uncertainty (r= .26, p=.01), but uncertain responses also tended to be reassuring (r=.24, p=.02). Fewer parents provided dogmatic explanations, but when they did so they tended to be the only explanation provided, and were positively related to children’s anxious behaviors (r= .25, p=.02). Our poster will also include incoming data collected in the U.S. and Colombia, to explore social-cultural variations in caregiver explanations of illness under conditions of uncertainty.