Economic Stress and Child Outcomes: The Family Stress Model Among Asian American Families During COVID-19

Annie Fanta^1*Sei Eun Kim²Cindy J. Huang¹William Tsai³Cindy Y. Huang⁴

• ¹Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, United States
• ²Department of Family Science and Human Development, Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey, United States
• ³Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University, New York City, New York, United States
• ⁴College of Education, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, United States

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic posed a variety of stressors for families across the United States (U.S.), including an increase in financial insecurity (Prime et al., 2020).Particularly vulnerable to increased economic stress were low-income families, as they were more likely to hold jobs in sectors that were most severely impacted by the pandemic (Cubrich, 2020). With Asian American (AA) individuals overrepresented in these high layoff sectors (i.e., food services, retail, rideshare, beauty services), AAs experienced the sharpest increase in unemployment rates compared to other racial/ethnic groups during the early months of the pandemic (Kormendi & Brown, 2021). From February to May 2020, the national unemployment rate for AAs increased from 2.5% to 15% (Khan & Shih, 2021). Furthermore, rates of anti-Asian discrimination surged as AAs were perceived as COVID-19 carriers and blamed for the onset of the pandemic, resulting in increased hate crimes against AA individuals that included physical assaults and business vandalization (Tessler et al., 2020). This rise in anti-Asian racism also led to an avoidance of AA businesses with restaurants in Chinese neighborhoods closing at higher rates than food businesses in other neighborhoods (McGarity-Palmer et al., 2024). When the first reports of COVID-19 surfaced, the sales of some businesses in New York City's Chinatown dropped 85% well before the first stay-at-home mandates (Roberts, 2020). In Southern California, two in five business owners reported that anti-Asian racism impacted their business through various forms such as vandalism, assault, and harassment (Ong et al., 2021). From the same sample, one in six businesses reported changing their operations due to safety concerns related to racism and a tenth of businesses reported a decline in business specifically due to avoidance of AA people and businesses.