The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has dramatically worsened people’s psychological well-being. Our aim was to examine for the first time the concurrent and longitudinal relations of family resilience with hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, and the moderating role of socio-demographics. For people having a romantic partner, we also explored whether family resilience and dyadic coping were uniquely related to well-being. One cross-sectional study (N = 325) and one 10-week follow-up study (N = 112) were carried out during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic (April–May 2020) in Northern Italy. Adult participants completed an online questionnaire in both studies. Correlation, multivariate regression, and moderation analyses were carried out with IBM SPSS version 28 and its PROCESS macro. Significance of differences in correlation and regression coefficients was tested through Steiger’s procedure, Wald test, and SUEST method. Family resilience was found to relate more strongly to eudaimonic (versus hedonic) well-being concurrently and to hedonic (versus eudaimonic) well-being longitudinally. The concurrent or longitudinal relations with hedonic well-being were generally stronger for females, part-time workers, and people undergoing multiple stressors. For people having a romantic partner, family resilience was concurrently associated with well-being independently of dyadic coping, whereas dyadic coping was longitudinally related to well-being independently of family resilience. Family resilience was found to protect, in the short term, the psychological well-being of people facing the pandemic outbreak. Its protective role mainly concerned hedonic well-being and was more pronounced for more vulnerable people. For persons having a romantic partner, however, dyadic coping seemed to have equal, if not greater, positive short-term effects.

The COVID-19 pandemic led many individuals to experience moral transgressions, exacerbating feelings of guilt and remorse. This study explored the role of the self-forgiveness of such transgressions in explaining their associations with psychological well-being and family conflict. We hypothesized that (a) higher levels of self-forgiveness would be associated with greater psychological well-being and reduced family conflict, (b) the perceived relevance of moral transgressions would be positively associated with self-forgiveness and indirectly associated with psychological well-being and family conflict through the mediation of self-forgiveness, and (c) the relationships between the variables of interest could vary across age. Adults (N = 277; M age = 30.04) completed anonymous online questionnaires assessing the relevance of transgressions committed, forgiveness and unforgiveness of self, psychological well-being, and family conflict during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. Structural equation modeling revealed that transgression relevance was positively associated with both forgiveness and unforgiveness of self, and indirectly related to psychological well-being and family conflict via self-forgiveness. Greater forgiveness of self was related to greater eudaimonic well-being, whereas greater unforgiveness of self was linked to increased family conflict and reduced eudaimonic well-being. The findings also indicated that age moderated the relationship between forgiveness of self and hedonic well-being, with the association weakening as age increased. The results highlight the importance of promoting self-forgiveness to enhance psychological resilience and familial stability, particularly during challenging times.

Mothers are the protagonists in a widespread narrative that emphasizes motherhood as prolonged and exclusive attention to children, accompanied by references to natural competence in child-rearing skills. The present research aimed to investigate the linking mechanisms and conditional processes underlying the perception of mothers’ competence. Cisgender heterosexual Italian participants (N = 230) read one of four vignettes describing a situation in which a mother (i.e., heterosexual biological mother, heterosexual stepmothers, lesbian stepmother, and lesbian biological mother) interacts with her two children who had misbehaved. After reading the vignette, the participants rated the depicted mother’s competence and to what extent the children’s misbehaviour was attributable to the mother. Moderated-mediation analyses indicated that all the non-traditional mothers were perceived as being less competent compared to the heterosexual biological mother, by giving them greater responsibility for their children’s misbehaviour, among participants with medium–high levels of traditional gender-role beliefs. Sexual orientation and biology relatedness were not cumulative variables, but intersecting categories creating a unique way to perceive mothers. As the number of non-traditional families grows, negative societal attitudes toward non-traditional parents and their children should be increasingly considered.