Children and COVID-19 Research Library

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.

Children are widely recognized as a vulnerable population during disasters and emergencies. The COVID-19 pandemic, like a natural disaster, brought uncertainties and instability to the economic development of the society and social distancing, which might lead to child maltreatment. This study aims to investigate whether job loss, income reduction and parenting affect child maltreatment.

Understanding how child and adolescent health is influenced by fluctuations in socioeconomic status has important public health and policy implications, as children are often subjected to both micro and macro-level socioeconomic events. This study provides the first systematic review to date on the relationship between changes in household or parental socioeconomic status and subsequent child and adolescent health outcomes.

Over the last two decades, there has been evidence of significant improvements in the overall living standards of Young Lives families. Young people are substantially better off than their parents and have aspirations for social mobility, despite the impact of persistent inequalities undermining educational outcomes and the chances of getting a decent job. New research from the Young Lives COVID-19 phone survey in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam paints a worrying picture of how the economic and social impact of COVID-19 lockdowns and related restrictions could not only halt progress made over the last two generations, but could also reverse life chances and entrench existing inequalities for many young people, hitting those living in poor communities hardest.

The degree to which children experience unmet need for dental care during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its association with pandemic-related household job or income loss, is unknown. The authors performed a cross-sectional household survey of 348 families in Pittsburgh, PA during the week June 25 to July 2, 2020. Unmet need for child dental care and pandemic-related household job or income loss were assessed using caregiver self-report.

COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented human and health crisis and has been affecting lives in many forms. What seemed to be a health crisis eventually became a major ongoing global economic crisis. Sector-wide disruptions are threatening both short- and long-term livelihoods and well-being of millions of youth around the globe, especially youth from vulnerable communities. Business closures threatened the operations and soundness of the enterprises resulting in layoffs and wage losses, affecting a major chunk of youth including the young care leavers of alternative care programmes in Asia. This called for customised interventions and support for such young care leavers. Immediate actions were needed for managing their mental health, for maintaining education continuity and for reskilling of such young care leavers to prepare them to cope with the pandemic. This article is based on the learning and experiences of SOS Children’s Villages responses to supporting nearly 1,500 care leavers in various Asian countries.

The corona virus has emerged as a dreaded disease globally, and it is no longer a news that the virus is a killer disease. It has paralyzed individual and nations’ economic activities due to the governments’ orders made to curtail its spread. Based on this, the researchers explored parental responses to social and safety needs of their school children during the pandemic in Ogun State, Nigeria. Four research questions were raised, and a questionnaire titled “COVID-19 Pandemic and Parental Response to School Children Survey” (online) was used to elicit data from 5,340 respondents. The data collected were analyzed using frequency count, simple percentage, mean, standard deviation, and Analysis of Variance.

The Covid-19 pandemic upended the country, with enormous economic and social shifts. Given the increased contact from families living in virtual confinement coupled with massive economic disarray, the Covid-19 pandemic may have created the ideal conditions to witness a rise in children’s experience of abuse and neglect. Yet such a rise will be difficult to calculate given the drop in official mechanisms to track its incidence. The current investigation utilized two studies conducted early in the pandemic to evaluate maltreatment risk.

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.

As 2020 draws to a close, the economic devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shows no sign of abating. Without urgent action, global poverty and inequality will deepen dramatically. Hundreds of millions of people have already lost their jobs, gone further into debt or skipped meals for months. Research by Oxfam and Development Pathways shows that over 2 billion people have had no support from their governments in their time of need. This study shows that none of the social protection support to those who are unemployed, elderly people, children and families provided in low- and middle-income countries has been adequate to meet basic needs. 41% of that government support was only a one-off payment and almost all government support has now stopped. Decades of social policy focused on tiny levels of means-tested support have left most countries completely unprepared for the COVID-19 economic crisis. Yet, countries such as South Africa and Bolivia have shown that a universal approach to social protection is affordable, and that it has a profound impact on reducing inequality and protecting those who need it most.

The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has put economies across the globe in an unexpected hibernation as governments of many countries have announced weeks-long lockdown to flatten the curve of infection. It cannot be debunked that the lockdown was deemed as ‘the essential vaccine’ in the current times, but unfortunately, it is coming with a critical trade-off . The trade-off, not of economic costs vs human life, which has been much debated and documented but of one human life vs another. Specifically, in case of India, with a population of 1.3 billion, of which more than two-third are situated in rural settlements, this outbreak has become quite intimidating as the already limited health infrastructure has come under severe pressure to cater to the patients with the contagion.

In response to the SARS-COV-2 threat Malawi has closed schools and universities. As a result, pupils risk losing their only good meal a day, shelter from household violence and stipends, delaying graduation and their first job in life. Moreover, Malawi blood transfusion service depends on schools, colleges, places of worship, and workplaces. Decreased blood stocks will increase preventable mortality.

This report investigates how COVID-19 and other shocks have impacted child well-being in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) during 2020 and the potential role of cash transfers and external resources to help children and economies. It reviews the latest social, economic and financial information from a range of global databases and modelling exercises, draws on emerging country-level reporting and carries out projections where recent data are unavailable. Although information remains incomplete and things are quickly evolving, the outlook is alarming.

COVID-19 constitutes the greatest crisis that high-income countries have seen in many generations. While many high-income countries experienced the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, or have had national recessions, the COVID-19 pandemic is much more than that. COVID-19 is a social and economic crisis, sparked by a protracted health crisis.

High-income countries have very limited experience of dealing with health crises, having their health and human services stretched beyond capacity, restricting the travel of their populations or having to close workplaces and schools – let alone experience of all of these things combined. These unique conditions create new and serious challenges for the economies and societies of all high-income countries. As these challenges evolve, children – as dependants – are among those at greatest risk of seeing their living standards fall and their personal well-being decline.

This new UNICEF Innocenti report explores how the social and economic impact of the pandemic is likely to affect children; the initial government responses to the crisis; and how future public policies could be optimized to better support children.