Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic emerged here in March 2020. The pandemic and lockdowns have been the cause of many parents doing both paid and unpaid work at home. Everyday life was a great challenge. Challenges, insecurities, and changes have caused people anxiety and fear, which has been and will only be reflected in the mental well-being of individuals. We wanted to find out how parents faced their fears, worries, and daily lives during the epidemic.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted to gain insight into parents’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovenia. Casual parental sampling was used and a total of 135 parents participated. To collect data, we developed a questionnaire based on a literature review. In addition, mental well-being was measured using the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being scale. Finally, the results were analyzed in the SPSS and R programs with the help of descriptive and inferential statistics.
Results: We found that 26.0% of children had SARS-CoV-2 and that few parents worked from home; 85.0% had the opportunity to provide protective equipment to all family members. Parents and children were dissatisfied with the change of life during the epidemic; children mainly due to the lack of social contacts. Of parents74.0% spent more time with their children due to the lockdown and 56.0% had to be substitute teachers for their children using distance learning. The most common fear was that the adults would bring the infection home and get sick, the child would get hurt, or the parent would get sick. Parental mental well-being was aver-age (M= 53.20; SD = 9.61) and did not differ between the sexes (p> 0.05).
Discussion: We found that parents were most afraid of bringing the infection into the home environment. Parents had to provide care and assistance to their children while working at home or at work. They had to do more unpaid work in the family and were more mentally burdened. Parents were more burdened and dissatisfied with the change of life, but they quickly adapted to these circumstances, so their mental well-being remained unchanged. The children were disappointed with the ban on socializing with their peers and distance learning.
Conclusion: With the duration of the pandemic, people were more afraid of changed life circumstances and worries about work, care, and schooling of children than they were of the infection. Despite the gradual release of measures to limit the spread ofCOVID-19, people still followed self-protection measures. Now, however, due to unclear
Published in Innovative Nursing Care, De Gruyter 2023. Link to eBook: https://sjf.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SJFC_INST/e2mvja/alma991002128944403881
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