**4. Discussion**

The current study provided a multifaceted investigation of parental distress and parental perception of children's EFs following the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the first lockdown in Italy.

Based on previous data demonstrating how distress affected parents more than those who did not have children, as well as younger parents [55,56], we hypothesized that, during the first COVID-19 lockdown, the parents who experienced the greatest distress perceived their children as more difficult to manage and more at risk of developmental frailty. More distressed parents, indicating a lack of resources or a prevalence of risk factors, are more likely to be too overwhelmed by the pandemic; this prevents them from supporting their children and responding to children's questions, fears, and difficulties [57,58]. When children do not find emotional containment and responsive answers to their preoccupations from their parents, they are more likely to show higher levels of distress, with more difficulties in emotional and behavioral domains, such as inattention, concentration problems, and dysregulation [26,58].

Our findings confirm previous research by showing a general distressful condition in most of the parents who participated in this study [26,59,60]. This distressful condition is underlined by an average (and a widely variable) level of claimed resources; in fact, some parents (<36 years old) described their conditions by referring to the presence of moderate available resources, other parents (36–45 years old) indicated very few resources.

Furthermore, as previous studies showed [52,61,62], the risk factors for parenting distress are closely related to sociodemographic characteristics, such as child features and family functioning; our data on parental distress focused on the possible effects of sociodemographic variables, highlighting a high-risk group for parenting-related distress, characterized by the following factors: having a child with atypical patterns of development and needing specialist support (psychological or psychotherapeutic intervention) during the pandemic.

These data underline how, during the pandemic, the lack of important resources, such as adequate social support by family and friends, could be predictors of parental burnout (common antecedents). The lower rates of distress levels in parents who declared to have asked for help during the lockdown, such as professional help, underline the importance of psychological support being offered to parents in this phase of an epochal crisis. Moreover, being the parent of a child exhibiting atypical patterns of development was found to be a big source of distress, referring both to general predictors of parental burnout (common antecedents) and aspects strictly related to parental burnout (specific antecedents). This condition also affected parental perception of EF children. Children exhibiting atypical patterns of development were perceived as less able to manage and perform tasks requiring working memory, shifting, and attention processes during the lockdown. On the other hand, this is coherent with well-documented results in the literature showing a poorer performance on EF, especially working memory, in children with special needs [63].

According with some current research [64–66], parents of children with disabilities or chronic disease suffered the most from a complete lockdown, experiencing several new problems and increasing those already existing before the pandemic. A large amount of literature demonstrates how parents of children exhibiting atypical development experienced higher levels of parental distress compared to parents of children exhibiting typical patterns of development [17–19,67]; however, during the lockdown, they reached higher levels of distress, just because they started from disadvantaged conditions. Our study confirmed the negative effects of home confinement on parental distress when children have a disability or developmental fragility; the unexpected lifestyle changes generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, were even more difficult for children exhibiting atypical development, as well as for their families [68], especially because the professional support of those specialists (physicians, therapists, psychologists, etc.) who took care of children had decreased. Parents had to reorganize the daily activities and structure them according to their children's needs, so this condition influenced both the wellbeing of parents and the psychological functioning

and adjustment of the child [6,69,70]. Moreover, vulnerability factors, such as previous special needs, were demonstrated to enhance the appearance of psychological problems because of fears and worries concerning the worsening of atypical conditions, and the lack and/or limitation of external specialist support [33]. The literature has demonstrated how parents of children with disabilities are more likely to experience higher levels of parental distress characterized by perceptions of an imbalance between parenting requests and personal available resources. This can lead them to manage their children's education, "less sensitively", using less "efficacy-coping" strategies, or decreasing their ability to face challenging tasks with increasing risk of exacerbating their disability.

Therefore, we could hypothesize that, during the first COVID-19 lockdown, parents were more distressed compared to the stress faced during normal life conditions, and this might have increased their difficulty to manage the normal parental functions of caregiving and scaffolding [26]. Many parents likely experienced difficulties, in regard to satisfying the real needs of their children; at times, they might have overstimulated or hyper-controlled them, but often they hypo-stimulated them with little attention, in the absence of educational activities, in which the child could have otherwise experienced autonomy, self-efficacy, etc.

Moreover, our findings showed significant relationships between parental distress levels and the perception of the child's cognitive abilities. The most distressed parents perceived their children as less competent in EFs, highlighting their cognitive fragility in attention, memory, and self-regulation tasks. However, the opposite direction of this relationship is admissible and plausible, given that correlation analyses do not allow establishing any causal link. Parents who perceive their children as less competent on EF tasks might have experienced more distressful requests of parenting and scaffolding to compensate for the absence of external specialist help during the lockdown [43,45,46]. Thus, these parents perceived themselves as having minor resources to face distressful events.

Although the main goal of this study was to observe short-term effects of pandemic events after the first strict lockdown, and establish a bivariate association between investigated variables, following the above-discussed correlational findings, linear regression analyses were carried out. These findings showed the higher predictive value of specific antecedents on all EF components, working memory, attention control, planning, shifting and inhibition. We can conjecture that the distress conditions strictly related to parental burnout make parents more impatient, less tolerant, and less able to manage their children at home, and to accept and support the developmental fragility of their children. Thus, these parents can adopt education measures and parent–child interactions that hamper their child's self-regulatory skills, and end up influencing later cognitive development [47–49]. However, this causal relationship should be explored in more depth in the future; longitudinal studies can confirm these preliminary results.
