**5. Conclusions**

To conclude, the findings of this study suggest that the first COVID-19 lockdown strongly influenced parental distress and their resources as well as parental perception of their children on working memory, attention, and shifting tasks, especially in the case of previous atypical development conditions. Thus, the evidence from this study reinforces the need to provide families with psychological aid, even in restrictive lockdown conditions, through different modalities, ranging from telephonic/electronic media platform consultations to online workshops that are able to support and/or enhance parenting skills, psychological techniques to deal with anxiety and parental distress, relaxation exercises, art therapy, and mindfulness training [6]. In the pandemic scenario, the role of psychological intervention is crucial for everyone, but it is needed for families of children with atypical development that experience temporary interruption of care assistance due to the increase in emotional fatigue (characterizing parenting strategies) and in children's pre-existing vulnerabilities. Practitioners need to implement autonomy-supportive programs to teach parents how to cope with stress, with the indirect aim to optimize outcomes for children

with special needs. For example, programs to decrease parental stress reinforce the use of task-oriented and emotion-oriented coping strategies, to deliver the satisfaction of parental competence, even in abnormal pandemic conditions.

The strength of this study is that it contributes toward bridging the gap in the lack of research on parental distress and children's EF impairments during the COVID-19 lockdown, as affected by short-term consequences of pandemic conditions.

Nevertheless, future research is necessary to remedy the shortcomings of this study. The most important limitation lies in the relatively small size of our sample. This was because the recruitment of participants took place in a well-defined time-lapse, immediately after the end of the first spring lockdown in Italian, prior to the following autumn partial lockdown. This period was selected to investigate the short-term effects of pandemic events on cognitive development. Moreover, a low effect size for most comparisons was found, indicating the need of further analyses on other eventual variables, which play a role in the relationship between variables we investigated. Another shortcoming of this study lies in methodological concerns, as the measurement of children's EFs is based not on the administration of cognitive performance-based tests, but rather on rating scales that measured children's EFs through a parent-reported questionnaire, revealing parental perceptions of their children's cognitive abilities. The choice of this measure was forced by the need to carry out research online, given the pandemic conditions. However, this questionnaire was found, by previous researchers, to be an ecologically valid indicator of EF functioning in concrete, complex, and everyday life situations, as well as suitable for inclusion in research projects with children who require the study of numerous variables.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, C.P., G.L., and M.A.; methodology, C.P.; software, M.A., S.B.; formal analysis, C.P., M.A.; resources, G.L.; data curation, S.B.; writing—original draft preparation, C.P., M.A., S.B.; writing—review and editing, C.P., M.A., S.B.; supervision, M.A. and G.L.; project administration, G.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received funding from Centro Siciliano Sturzo.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Ethics Committee of University of Palermo (protocol code n. 13/2020).

**Informed Consent Statement:** The study was anonymous and conducted via the internet (online questionnaire). Each respondent was informed that taking part in the research and submitting their results would be treated as the respondent's consent to participate in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** The data presented in this study are available upon request from the corresponding author.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
