“Covid‐19 is dangerous”: The role of parental verbal threat information on children's fear of Covid‐19

In this study, we collected online cross‐sectional survey data about fear of Covid‐19, parent–child communication, parental anxiety, and child temperament from 195, 8 to 18‐year‐old children and their parents in the Netherlands, in the period between June 11, 2020 and May 28, 2021. The aim was twofold. First, the study aimed to extend earlier findings on the link between parent and child fears of Covid‐19 and the mediating role of parental verbal information about Covid‐19 to a Dutch sample. It is important to replicate the studies by Radanovićet al. (2021) and Uy et al. (2022) in different countries as fear of Covid is context‐dependent and relates not only to governmental measures but also to cultural differences (Lin et al., 2021). Furthermore, this study is the first to assess parental verbal threat information about Covid‐19 using both child and parent reports. Previous studies reported the benefit of using multiple informants to assess parenting behavior (Renk, 2005). Therefore, including child and parent reports on parental threat communication can provide a more complete picture of whose perspective drives the studied associations. We expected that parents' fear of Covid‐19 would be positively related to their children's fear of Covid‐19 and that this link will be partly mediated by parental verbal threat information.