Family Resilience and Adolescent Mental Health during COVID-19: A Moderated Mediation Model

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted and is still impacting people’s lives, including physical and mental health. Family plays an important role in adolescent mental health due to the long staying at home. Aims: This paper aimed to investigate the impact of family resilience on adolescent mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the mediation role of pandemic stress perception and the moderation role of meta-mood. Methods: A total of 2691 Chinese adolescents were recruited using convenient sampling. Their mental health, family resilience, pandemic stress perception and meta-mood were surveyed. Multivariate statistics were used to analyze the data. Results: Our results showed that (1) about 36.7% adolescents in our sample have some mental health problems; (2) family resilience can positively predict adolescent mental health, whereas pandemic stress perception can negatively predict mental health; (3) pandemic stress perception mediates the relationship between family resilience and adolescent mental health; (4) meta-mood moderates the relationship between family resilience and pandemic perception, i.e., the first half of the mediation role. Conclusions: Our results indicate that one can either improve family resilience or improve adolescents’ meta-mood to relieve adolescents’ mental health problems.