Psychology Professor Abbie Goldberg has spent her career researching adoptive parents and nontraditional families, so when the pandemic hit, she reached out to families she’s followed for decades to see how they were adjusting to lifestyle challenges thrust upon them by COVID-19.

She found that adoptive families have faced unique challenges, and pandemic stresses have had a particularly negative impact on divorcing and divorced couples.

Tapping into her 15-year, ongoing longitudinal study of 150 adoptive families, Goldberg interviewed 89 adoptive parents in 23 states and heard their familiar, unsurprising concerns: their fear of job loss or furloughs, loss of work/home life boundaries, declining mental health, and exhaustion.

Goldberg said that among the survey participants, whom she described as “highly educated, typically well-resourced, and traditionally more active in their child’s schooling,” she found that lesbian parents — who were more often working at home and caring for kids with emotional and learning problems — tended to be more taxed than heterosexual parents during the pandemic.

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