Children and COVID-19 Research Library

UNICEF Innocenti's curated library of COVID-19 + Children research

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Journal article

Everyday life of children in out-of-home care during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Pia K. Eriksson; Siiri Utriainen

Published: November 2022 Journal: European Journal of Social Work

This article scrutinises the impacts of COVID-19 on the everyday life of children in out-of-home care in Finland during the first year of the pandemic. A content analysis was conducted on survey data of municipal social workers’ evaluations on the effect of the pandemic on 773 children in foster and residential care.

Cite this research | Open access | Language: English | Topics: Social Protection, Well-being and Equity | Tags: child care services, child protection measures, child welfare, child well-being, COVID-19 response, lockdown, social distance, social services | Countries: Finland

Journal article

How child inclusive were Australia's responses to COVID-19?

AUTHOR(S)
Sharon Bessell; Celia Vuckovic

Published: August 2022 Journal: Australian Journal of Social Issues

From March 2020, Australia introduced a range of policies to respond to COVID-19, most of which impacted significantly on the lives of children. This article applies a child-centred framework, developed from rights-based participatory research with children, to analyse how children have been represented in policy narratives around COVID-19 and the extent to which policy responses have been child-inclusive or child-centred.

Journal article

The impact of COVID-19 and immigration enforcement on service delivery for immigrant origin families involved in the child welfare system

AUTHOR(S)
Kristina Lovato; Megan Finno-Velasquez; Sophia Sepp (et al.)

Published: August 2022 Journal: Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal

This descriptive study sought to explore how child welfare agencies and community partner organizations experienced and adapted service provision for immigrant children and families during the COVID-19 pandemic. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were completed with 31 child welfare agency practitioners and community partners in 11 states who work with immigrant clients or on immigration related policies within the child welfare sector. Data were coded and analyzed using a thematic analysis approach.

Journal article

Transformative lessons learned from COVID-19 to reimagine child welfare work

AUTHOR(S)
Amy S. He; Julie A. Cederbaum; Robin Leake

Published: July 2022 Journal: Journal of Public Child Welfare

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and because of the critical and essential nature of child welfare work, this workforce moved out of agency settings to remote work. Drawing from the theory of large systems change, this study explored child welfare caseworkers’ perspectives on how organizational changes due to the pandemic affected them as workers and their recommendations for sustained organizational change in child welfare. This narrative analysis explored secondary data collected in May 2020 about workforce needs related to the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 783). Regarding the impact of COVID-19, three themes emerged: (a) job impact (no change, limited change or positive outcome); (b) challenges (engaging with clients, conducting assessments, meeting with families, and using technology); and (c) impact on worker well-being (safety concerns, job stress, anxiety about the future). Three themes also emerged for recommendations for permanent workplace changes: (a) workplace flexibility (work from home, hybrid schedule); (b) better use of technology (virtual meetings and supporting remote access), and (c) worker well-being (support for worker safety and work–life balance and integration).

Cite this research | Open access | Language: English | Topics: Health, Social Protection, Well-being and Equity | Tags: child care services, child welfare, COVID-19 response, lockdown, public services, social distance

Journal article

COVID-19 and child welfare policy in Chile: the experience of front-line workers

AUTHOR(S)
Javiera Garcia-Meneses; Ivan Chanez-Cortes; Paulina Montoya Ceballos

Published: February 2022 Journal: International Social Work

COVID-19 arrived in Chile amid social protests that questioned the State’s ability to protect children’s rights. Nevertheless, child policy workers continued working despite the drastic changes to their daily work generated by both the pandemic and conflicts within the child welfare system. This article aims to understand how these workers have experienced and overcome these challenges. It shows that they have continued doing interventions with children at the expense of their economic resources and well-being. These findings highlight the need for the government to take immediate action, offering guidelines to improve child policy workers’ labor conditions.

Cite this research | Open access | Language: English | Topics: Social Protection, Well-being and Equity | Tags: child care services, child welfare, COVID-19 response, lockdown, professional workers, social distance, social services, social workers | Countries: Chile

Journal article

Understanding the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on families involved in the child welfare system: technological capital and pandemic practice

AUTHOR(S)
Jordan B. Conrad; Kate Magsamen-Conrad

Published: January 2022 Journal: Child & Family Social Work

Child-welfare practices transformed drastically in 2020 after governments instituted quarantining and social-distancing measures. Child visitation, mental health evaluations and treatment, and court hearings either ceased or only accessible via information communication technologies (ICTs). Peer-reviewed published scholarship about technology use in child welfare is limited to voluntary, supplemental contexts and insufficient to understand the nuanced effects of this transition on vulnerable populations. A critical case study ethnography was used to name this phenomenon, ‘pandemic practice’, and describe how case-management challenges were compounded and/or masked by pandemic practice. Mandatory ICT use in case management contributed to injustices for some families in the child-welfare system, including children spending extended time in foster care, families receiving superficial treatment services and irreparable harm to timely case progression. This study used technology adoption theory and technological capital framework to identify and understand the complexities of pandemic practice beyond a simple digital divide perspective. It presents a hierarchy of technological capital necessary to participate in pandemic practice, suggestions to create sufficient capital and implications for policy and practice.

Research Report

The Changing childhood project: a multigenerational, international survey on 21st century childhood

Institution: *UNICEF, Gallup
Published: November 2021

We are living through an era of rapid and far-reaching transformation. As the world has changed — becoming more digital, more globalized, and more diverse — childhood is changing with it. The Changing Childhood Project — a collaboration of UNICEF and Gallup — was created to explore these shifts, and to better understand what it means to be a child in the 21st century. The project seeks to answer two questions: What is it like growing up today? And how do young people see the world differently? To answer these questions, we wanted to hear from children and young people themselves. Comparing the experiences and views of young versus older people offers a powerful lens to explore how childhood is changing, and where generations diverge or converge. The ultimate goal of the project is to centre young people — their experiences and perspectives — in the work of improving life for all children, today and into the future.

Cite this research | No. of pages: 73 | Language: English | Topics: Social Protection, Well-being and Equity | Tags: child development, child education, child welfare, child well-being, communication, COVID-19 response, lockdown, social distance | Publisher: *UNICEF

Journal article

Tweens are not teens: the problem of amalgamating broad age groups when making pandemic recommendations

AUTHOR(S)
Brae Anne McArthur; Sheri Madigan; Daphne J. Korczak

Published: October 2021 Journal: Canadian Journal of Public Health

Demarcating childhood into two distinct and broad 10-year age bands of over and under age 10 is a disservice to our tween population (9–12 years), and may be overlooking our role in understanding the negative impacts of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) during a formative period of development. This commentary, discusses the importance of considering tweens as a unique population of youth who are differentially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It first describes the distinctive progress of tweens across various facets of developmental health, followed by recommendations to improve understanding and address impact of the pandemic and its restrictions on tweens. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a large impact on the day-to-day lives of tweens and what is done now will have long-lasting effects on their lifelong trajectories.

Cite this research | Open access | No. of pages: 4 | Language: English | Topics: Health, Mental Health | Tags: child development, child health, child welfare, child well-being, COVID-19 response, lockdown, mental health services, psychological distress, school attendance, social distance | Countries: Canada

Journal article

The impact of COVID-19 on child welfare-involved families: implications for parent–child reunification and child welfare professionals

AUTHOR(S)
Abbie E. Goldberg; David Brodzinsky; Jacqueline Singer (et al.)

Published: September 2021 Journal: Developmental Child Welfare

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted children and parents involved in the child welfare system and the professionals working with these families. Using survey data collected August–September of 2020, this mixed-methods study examined the perspectives of 196 child welfare-involved professionals (77 attorneys, 99 caseworkers, and 20 therapists) in the United States about the impact of COVID-19 on parents of origin, children, foster parents, and child welfare professionals. Particular attention was paid to the implications of COVID-19 and associated challenges for parent–child contact and reunification. With respect to professional stresses, more than half of participants worried about their own personal safety and health amidst COVID-19, and more than three-quarters expressed concerns about the safety and well-being of child welfare-involved families.

Cite this research | No. of pages: 22 | Language: English | Topics: Social Protection, Well-being and Equity | Tags: child welfare, child well-being, COVID-19 response, foster care, lockdown, parent-child relationship, social distance | Countries: United States

Journal article

What the COVID-19 pandemic reveals about racial differences in child welfare and child well-being

AUTHOR(S)
Zachary Parolin

Published: February 2021 Journal: Race and Social Problems

This paper introduces the special issue on race, child welfare, and child well-being. In doing so, I summarize the evidence of racial/ethnic disparities in child well-being after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent findings demonstrate that, compared to white children, black and Latino children are more likely to have experienced poverty and food insufficiency, to have had parents lose their jobs, and to be exposed to distance learning and school closures during the pandemic. I argue that though COVID-19 has indeed worsened racial/ethnic disparities in child well-being, it has also served to place a spotlight on the American welfare state’s historical mistreatment of low-income families and black and Latino families in particular. Consider that around three-fourths of black and Latino children facing food insufficiency during the pandemic also experienced food insufficiency prior to the onset of the pandemic. Moving forward, analyses of racial/ethnic disparities in child well-being during the pandemic, I argue, must not only consider the economic shock and high unemployment rates of 2020, but the failure of the American welfare state to adequately support jobless parents, and black and Latino parents in particular, long before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.

Journal article

Youth (in)justice and the COVID-19 pandemic: rethinking incarceration through a public health lens

AUTHOR(S)
Faith Gordon; Hannah Klose; Michelle Lyttle Storrod

Published: January 2021 Journal: Current Issues in Criminal Justice

Serious concerns for the safety and well-being of children and young people are multiplying due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has called for children’s urgent release from prison. Evidence demonstrates that incarceration can aggravate existing health conditions and result in new health issues, such as depression, suicidal thoughts and post-traumatic stress disorder. This paper draws on findings from a larger study involving 25 qualitative interviews with policy makers, practitioners and researchers working in youth justice and utilises Victoria in South East Australia as a case study.

Journal article

Direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 on maternal and child health in Bangladesh

AUTHOR(S)
Mortuza Ahmmed; Ashraful Babu; Jannatul Ferdosy

Published: December 2020 Journal: Journal of Statistics and Management Systems

Bangladesh has been going through incremental trend of GDP growth rates for a long time. The GDP is the key aspect to measure the economic growth of a country. But the current world wide pandemic due to the COVID-19 hardly affects the world’s economy as well as Bangladesh. The present lockdown make the wheel of the industries uncertain. The main source of the GDP of this country is ready made garment sector which has been shut down since mid of March 2020. Already 20 billion of cancellation of foreign order makes the situation worse. Also, the foreign remittance has been decline dramatically due to the loss of jobs of Bangladeshi workers in foreign countries. The overall economic situation declines in this country due to the COVID-19 which has huge impact on the health care system especially in maternal and child health. In this paper, the economic situation of Bangladesh before and during the COVID-19 has been shown. Also, how the COVID-19 would affect the condition of maternal and child health across the country directly as well as indirectly through the GDP has been discussed.

Journal article

Normalcy for children in foster care in the time of coronavirus

AUTHOR(S)
Mary Elizabeth Collins; Sarah Baldiga

Published: November 2020 Journal: Journal of Children's Services

This paper aims to describe how a sense of normalcy for young people in foster care can be critical to their well-being. This paper reports on policy and practice efforts in the USA to promote normalcy for youth in care. The authors review policy that promotes normalcy and report on one organization's efforts to support these goals.

Commentaries and Think Pieces

A crisis for a system in crisis: forecasting from the short‐ and long‐term impacts of COVID‐19 on the child welfare system

AUTHOR(S)
Kristen Pisani‐Jacques Pisani‐Jacques

Published: October 2020 Journal: Family Court Review

The COVID‐19 pandemic has thrust the world into a crisis – and the child welfare system is particularly susceptible to its effects. This pandemic has exacerbated some of the most problematic aspects of the system, and its impacts will reverberate long after the immediate crisis ends. As COVID‐19 spread, families were instantly impacted – in‐person family time was cancelled, youth and families were unable to access basic resources, services, and technology, and access to the courts was curtailed.

Policy brief

Data-informed recommendations for services providers working with vulnerable children and families during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Nicole Gilbertson Wilke; Amanda Hiles Howard; Delia Pop

Published: July 2020 Journal: Child Abuse & Neglect

The goal of the present study was to better understand the impact of the pandemic and associated response measures on vulnerable children and families and provide data-informed recommendations for public and private service providers working with this population.

Cite this research | No. of pages: 11 | Language: English | Topics: Child Protection, Social Protection, Well-being and Equity | Tags: child care services, child protection measures, child welfare, COVID-19 response, pandemic

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UNICEF Innocenti's Children and COVID-19 Library is a database collecting research from around the world on COVID-19 and its impacts on children and adolescents.

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Children and COVID-19 Research Library

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