Visiting parents in times of COVID-19: The impact of parent-adult child contacts on the psychological health of the elderly
利用SHARE第8波和新冠调查数据，研究发现疫情期间亲子接触中断使老年人抑郁症状增加约17%，且与不住在一起的成年子女接触中断概率更高。
Using the 8th wave of the SHARE and the SHARE Corona Survey, we investigated whether the disruption of parent-adult child contacts due to social distancing restrictions increased the symptoms of depression among old age individuals during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. We model the relationship between the disruption of parent-adult child contacts and the mental health of the elderly using a recursive simultaneous equation model for binary variables. Our findings show that the likelihood of disruption of parent-adult child contacts was higher with adult children who do not live with or close to their parents (i.e., in the same household or in the same building) for whom contact disruption increases about 15 %. The duration of restrictions to movement and lockdowns also has a positive and significant effect on parent-child contact disruption: an additional week of lockdown significantly increases the probability of parent-child contact disruption, by about 1.5 %. The interventions deemed essential to reduce the spread of the pandemic, such as the "stay-at-home" order, necessarily disrupted personal parent-child contacts and the social processes that facilitate psychological well-being, increasing the probability of suffering from a deepening depressed mood by about 17 % for elderly parents.