The unusual school, work and home conditions that so many Americans have faced during the pandemic have given researchers new opportunities to study the causes and consequences of family stressors and behaviors.

When school buildings and child care centers closed, that led to an increase in the time kids spent using screens and worsened parent mental health to boot, according to a study from Boston College and the University of Maryland. As EdSurge reported last year, the researchers concluded that this uptick in children’s “screen time” reflected parents’ higher stress levels and lower access to resources, not any change in their philosophy about exposing their kids to hours of TV or YouTube.

As schools started to reopen, the team wondered whether they’d find the reverse effects. (That’s not a given, because humans tend to react more strongly when they lose resources than when they gain them.) Would sending kids back to school in person correspond with less leisure screen time for children and improved mental health for parents?

According to a new research paper, the answer to both questions is yes.

“Parents are less anxious and depressed. That was a pretty solid finding. And kids are getting less recreational screen time,” says Joshua Hartshorne, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College who wrote the report.

Hartshorne believes that the results help to quantify the high costs of school closures and significant benefits of reopening schools for parents—and therefore, for kids.

“Even if you don’t care about parent mental health for some reason, we know that depressed, anxious parents are not as engaged with their kids,” he says. “Not surprisingly, it’s hard to be a really warm, actively engaged parent if you are struggling yourself.”

The study found that the child care burden was less, and the mental health better, for parents whose kids went to school in person compared to those whose kids were learning virtually or in a hybrid format. It also found children going to school in person spent less recreational time with screens than those learning virtually. How hybrid schooling stacked up with regard to screen time was more ambiguous, perhaps in part because that concept means different things in different places.

Read the full article about parent mental health by Rebecca Koenig at EdSurge.