Children and COVID-19 Research Library

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to fundamental changes in Northern Cyprus much like all the other countries. Education is one of the sectors that has been affected intensely by the pandemic. This qualitative study aims to investigate parents’ views about educational challenges, experiences, and responsibilities about their children’s online learning process during the COVID-19 pandemic. Telephone interviews were conducted for data collection. Parents described the most performed online education activity as teacher-oriented instruction. Nearly all of the parents complained about internet connections being slow and weak along with teachers’ insufficient technology proficiency. Parents agreed that their role was much more challenging and complicated than it was in a traditional education setting.

Pandemic conditions have affected social movement activity in various ways. This article explorea how young Cypriot climate activists, associated with the global Fridays for Future movement, attempt to integrate pandemic conditions in their mobilizing tactics, as well as how such conditions affect their collective youth agency. It first looks into the strategic antagonistic framings they develop to counter dominant discourses of the pandemic as an unprecedented crisis and explores how these are informed by their understandings of, and emotions on, climate change as an effect of capitalism and overconsumption and as a type of ‘slow pandemic’.

COVID-19 has affected North Cyprus since the beginning of March 2020. On March 10th 2020, the council of ministers in North Cyprus announced a lockdown and listed some restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus; schools and entertainment centres were closed, and children had to spend most of their day at home. This study aims to examine the use of mobile technology before and during the COVID-19 lockdown period by children aged three to six, based on parents' opinions. This is a descriptive study with a sample of 319 parents. Data and demographic information were collected with a questionnaire and analysed with SPSS (24.0). Comparing the duration of mobile technology device usage before the pandemic and during the lockdown period, an increase is evident, as expected. Of note, when compared to the pre-pandemic period, it is found that there is a decrease in the rate of mobile technology device usage for video viewing during the lockdown period. The findings also suggest that children mostly first experienced mobile technology devices in some way before 36 months of age. This study has determined that most children do not have their own mobile technology device.

Non-pharmacological interventions (NPI), including lockdowns, have been used to address the COVID-19 pandemic. We describe changes in the environment and lifestyle of school children in Cyprus before the lockdown and during school re-opening, and assess compliance to NPI, using the exposome concept.