Three Years After COVID, Parents of Young Children Are Still Struggling Mentally

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world in 2020, few groups felt its weight more acutely than parents of infants and toddlers. Lockdowns collapsed support networks overnight, childcare vanished, and families with very young children were suddenly confined to their homes with round-the-clock caregiving demands. A new study published in BMC Psychology now reveals just how deep and lasting that burden has been. Drawing on more than four years of data from a large, population-based cohort in Amsterdam, researchers tracked the mental health of thousands of parents from before the pandemic through three years after it officially ended, and their findings paint a picture that is far more troubling than a simple story of recovery.

The research, led by Amber Sterenborg of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam together with colleagues from the Amsterdam Movement Sciences Research Institute, KU Leuven, the Dutch Ministry of Health, and the Public Health Service Amsterdam, used data from the dynamic Sarphati Cohort. This ongoing study collects repeated measurements from residents of Amsterdam, allowing scientists to follow the same individuals across major life and societal transitions. For this analysis, the team included 4,319 parents whose first measurement occurred before or during the pandemic, with all measurements restricted to periods when their children were between zero and three years old. Data collection spanned from October 2019 to January 2025, covering the pre-pandemic baseline, multiple pandemic phases including two lockdowns, and the post-pandemic years through 2024 and 2025.

What makes this study methodologically powerful is its use of linear mixed models, a statistical framework designed for repeated measurements nested within individuals. Rather than comparing different people at different times, mixed models track within-person change while accounting for the fact that some parents contributed more observations than others. The researchers analyzed 6,595 observations of psychological distress and loneliness, and 9,830 observations of parenting stress, distributed across eleven distinct time periods. They also examined self-reported changes in emotional well-being attributed to the pandemic, using descriptive analysis across 9,228 responses. This design allows the team to distinguish genuine temporal trends from artifacts of who happened to respond at any given moment, a persistent challenge in pandemic-era research.

The headline result concerns psychological distress, which rose significantly during the pandemic. Before COVID-19 arrived, the estimated marginal mean distress score stood at 4.41, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 4.12 to 4.71. During the second lockdown, that figure climbed to 4.83, with a confidence interval of 4.52 to 5.13, a statistically significant increase. Encouragingly, distress declined in 2022 as society reopened, suggesting that the acute phase of the pandemic did take a toll that eased with the restoration of normal life. But the recovery did not last. From 2023 onwards, distress began climbing again, and by 2024 and 2025 it reached an estimated marginal mean of 5.11, with a confidence interval of 4.72 to 5.49. That is higher than at any point during the pandemic itself, a finding the authors describe as evidence of ongoing psychological burden among parents of young children.

Loneliness followed a strikingly different trajectory. It increased significantly during the second lockdown, rising from a pre-pandemic estimated marginal mean of 1.40 to 1.78, and then, unlike distress, it never fully returned to baseline. Even in 2024 and 2025, loneliness remained elevated at 1.64, with a confidence interval of 1.48 to 1.79. This persistence is notable because loneliness is not merely an unpleasant feeling; it is a well-established risk factor for depression, cardiovascular disease, and impaired immune function. For parents of toddlers, who depend heavily on informal support from grandparents, friends, and other caregivers, the social disruption of the pandemic may have severed connections that proved difficult to rebuild, leaving a residue of isolation that outlived the emergency itself.

Parenting stress, the third outcome measured, showed perhaps the most concerning pattern of all. It rose modestly but significantly during the second lockdown, from a pre-pandemic estimated marginal mean of 16.0 to 16.3. But instead of declining after the pandemic ended, parenting stress continued to climb, reaching 17.4 by 2024 and 2025, with a confidence interval of 17.0 to 17.7. This continuous upward trajectory across the entire study period suggests that something fundamental changed in the experience of raising very young children, or that the stresses accumulated during lockdown years compounded rather than dissipated. The researchers measured parenting stress using repeated assessments across the full sample, making this one of the most robust longitudinal pictures of post-pandemic parental strain available to date.

The study also examined what predicted poor mental health during the pandemic itself, testing sociodemographic, family, household, and pandemic-specific factors. Four predictors stood out: financial difficulties, dissatisfaction with living conditions, additional childcare needs, and working from home. Each of these was significantly associated with poorer mental health among parents during the pandemic period. The pattern is coherent and intuitive. Families under financial strain faced the crisis with fewer buffers. Crowded or unsuitable housing made lockdown confinement harder to bear. Children with additional care needs demanded more from parents who simultaneously had to work, often from the same kitchen table. And remote work, while protective against infection, blurred the boundary between professional and parental responsibilities in ways that many families found unsustainable. These findings identify concrete targets for policy: the parents most at risk were those juggling material hardship with intensified caregiving demands.

Self-reported emotional well-being told a consistent story. Parents reported that the pandemic had worsened their emotional well-being most severely during the lockdown periods, when restrictions were tightest and support systems most constrained. This subjective measure aligns with the objective trajectory of distress and loneliness scores, strengthening confidence that the statistical trends reflect real experiences rather than measurement artifacts. The convergence of three distinct mental health indicators, each collected repeatedly across more than five years, makes the overall picture difficult to dismiss as a statistical quirk.

Why does this matter beyond the families directly affected? Parental mental health is one of the strongest known predictors of child development. Parents experiencing high distress, loneliness, or parenting stress are less able to provide the sensitive, responsive caregiving that shapes early brain development, emotional regulation, and attachment security during the critical first three years of life. The authors explicitly call for continued monitoring and support for families with young children, alongside research to identify which subgroups face persistent difficulties and how these challenges affect child development. In other words, the consequences of the pandemic for this generation of children may still be unfolding, transmitted through the mental health of their parents. A cohort of toddlers raised under lockdown conditions, whose parents are now reporting more distress and more parenting stress than ever measured in this study, deserves sustained scientific and policy attention.

The study, funded by ZonMw, the Dutch national health research funder, carries important caveats and strengths worth weighing. Its population-based design and dynamic cohort structure reduce the selection bias that plagued many pandemic studies, which often relied on convenience samples of highly motivated online respondents. Restricting analyses to parents of children aged zero to three keeps the comparison group meaningful, since parental stress naturally varies with child age. Yet the modest effect sizes, visible in the relatively small shifts in estimated marginal means, remind us that population averages can conceal both families in crisis and families who weathered the storm well. The authors themselves emphasize the need to identify which subgroups face persistent difficulties. What the data make unambiguous, however, is the direction of travel: three years after the World Health Organization declared an end to the global health emergency, parents of very young children in Amsterdam are lonelier, more distressed, and more stressed by parenting than they were before COVID-19 ever existed. The pandemic may be over as a public health event, but for these families, its psychological aftermath is still very much alive.

Subject of Research: Long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of parents with young children

Article Title: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health of parents with young children up to three years post-pandemic: a dynamic, population-based cohort study

Article References: Sterenborg, A., Vlemincx, E., van Acht, F., Groot-Sluijsmans, B., Kattevilder, J., Ujcic-Voortman, J. K., Wiegersma, A. M., van Stralen, M. M., & Basten, M. (2026). Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health of parents with young children up to three years post-pandemic: a dynamic, population-based cohort study. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05733-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05733-6

Keywords: parental mental health, COVID-19 pandemic, psychological distress, loneliness, parenting stress, young children, cohort study, Sarphati Cohort, lockdown, emotional well-being, child development, public health