Making sense of the pandemic: Parent-child conversations in two cultural contexts

The present study focused on parent-child conversations about COVID-19 related changes in children’s lives in Estonia and Germany with an aim to understand how children’s conceptual understanding of the disease and their emotional security is created and reflected in these interactions. Twenty-nine parent-child dyads from both cultural contexts provided self-recorded conversations. The conversations were analyzed for the type of explanations, emotional content, and valence. Estonian conversations were longer than those of German dyads. Explanatory talk appeared in both contexts but was general in nature. Conversations in both cultural contexts also included very few emotional references and tended to focus on both positive and negative aspects of the situation. The conversations show that parents tend to support children’s coping with stressful situations by helping them conceptually understand COVID-19 and paying little attention to children’s comprehension of feelings about the situation.