Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

The proposed study aims to investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on mother-child attachment. The pandemic upended daily life creating more stressors, particularly on parents and families. Stress has been found to limit parental responsivity, which negatively affects mother-child attachment. This has lifelong consequences as insecure attachment is associated with poor social and emotional competence, self-esteem, coping strategies and more. Since, COVID-19 upended life in a way that had not been experienced before, and the last respiratory illness pandemic of this severity was in 1918, there is limited research on the effect a pandemic has on childhood development. Previous research has studied adult coping to the COVID-19 pandemic, and mother-child attachment during the pandemic only immediately following birth. It remains to be studied how the pandemic affects attachment development over the first year, and how the potential role of stress impacts the relationship between respective parent and child attachment styles. The proposed study seeks to answer: What is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on an infants attachment to their primary caregiver? To answer this, children born between January 1 2020 and July 1 2020 will be recruited along with a parent. The Strange Situation will be conducted with the children while the parent will participate in the Adult Attachment Interview and the Perceived Stress Scale-12, which the parent will be asked to complete retrospectively based on the COVID-19 time period. If insecure attachment is found to be more prevalent it would be imperative to have early-intervention strategies for children and parents in order to lessen the consequences and facilitate more secure attachments.