Visiting parents in times of COVID-19: The impact of parent-adult child contacts on the psychological health of the elderly

• DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2022.101152
• Publication Date: 2022-06-07T17:42:22Z
• Authors: Agar Brugiavini; Cinzia Di Novi; Cristina Elisa Orso
• Keywords: Social distance; Social contact; Depression; Distancing

Using the 8th wave of SHARE and Corona Survey, we investigated whether disruption parent–adult child contacts due to social distancing restrictions increased symptoms depression among old age individuals during first COVID-19 pandemic. We model relationship between mental health elderly using a recursive simultaneous equation for binary variables. Our findings show that likelihood was higher with adult children who do not live or close their parents (i.e., in same household building) whom contact increases about 15 %. The duration movement lockdowns also has positive significant effect on parent-child disruption: an additional week lockdown significantly probability disruption, by 1.5 interventions deemed essential reduce spread pandemic, such as "stay-at-home" order, necessarily disrupted personal parent–child processes facilitate psychological well-being, increasing suffering from deepening depressed mood 17 % parents.