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Objective: This paper assesses stress disparities among marginalized parents in 2020-21 during the COVID-19 pandemic through the mechanism of healthcare discrimination. Background: The pandemic upended the lives of American families and had particularly stark mental health consequences for women, racial and ethnic minority (REM), and sexual and gender minority (SGM) parents. Scholars have been called to understand these unequal experiences via marginalizing mechanisms rather than using race, gender, and sexual identities as proxies for racism, sexism, and cis-heterosexism. Methods: Structural equation modeling was used to test associations between marginalized identities and parental stress about COVID among partnered parents using healthcare discrimination, a marginalizing mechanism, as a mediator. The data come from The National Couples' Health and Time Study, a population-representative study of couples in the United States. Results: Findings indicate that compared to nonmarginalized parents, Black parents, women, transgender and nonbinary parents, and gay, lesbian, and bisexual parents experienced higher levels of parental stress about COVID through heightened healthcare discrimination. When accounting for healthcare discrimination, only one marginalized identity-that of womcn-was directly associated with parental stress about COVID along with the indirect relationship through healthcare discrimination. Conclusion: These findings highlight healthcare discrimination as a process that puts marginalized parents at risk for heightened stress. Parental stress has the potential to accumulate across the life course and crossover to children and communities.

KEYWORDS

discrimination, health care, marginalized, parents, quantitative methodology, stress

INTRODUCTION

The COVID-19 pandemic upended family environments. One in five children had a parent lose their job (Bokun et al., 2020), 38% of Americans were food insecure (Wolfson & Leung, 2020), and children and parents experienced mental health declines (Gassman-Pines et al., 2020). Individuals marginalized due to their race and ethnicity, sexual identity, and/or gender experienced more severe detriments during the pandemic. Understanding how parents fared as they sought to protect their children during this crisis is crucial to identifying mechanisms linking race, gender, and sexual identity marginalization to disparities in parental well-being.

Scholars have documented the toll of the pandemic on racial and ethnic minoritized persons (REMs) and sexual and gender minoritized persons (SGMs). Women, especially mothers, were more likely to quit paid work due to "home or family concerns" (Tedeschi, 2020) which included managing physical and mental health risk for themselves and their...

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