Children and COVID-19 Research Library

The COVID-19 pandemic has created environments with increased risk factors for household violence, such as unemployment and financial uncertainty. At the same time, it led to the introduction of policies to mitigate financial uncertainty. Further, it hindered traditional measurements of household violence. Using an infoveillance approach, our goal was to determine if there were excess Google searches related to exposure to child abuse, intimate partner violence (IPV), and child-witnessed IPV during the COVID-19 pandemic and if any excesses are temporally related to shelter-in-place and economic policies.

Digital technology and social media use are common among young people in Australia and worldwide. Research suggests that young people have both positive and negative experiences online, but we know little about the experiences of Muslim communities. This study aims to explore the positive and negative experiences of digital technology and social media use among young people and parents from Muslim backgrounds in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. This study involved a partnership between researchers and a not-for-profit organization that work with culturally and linguistically diverse communities. We adopted a participatory and qualitative approach and designed the research in consultation with young people from Muslim backgrounds. Data were collected through in-person and online focus groups with 33 young people aged 16-22 years and 15 parents aged 40-57 years. Data were thematically analyzed.

In the interconnected family context, caregivers' digital media use holds important implications for children's developmental outcomes via parent-child relationships. This may be particularly salient during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, when caregivers were more reliant on technology than ever before. This study examined caregivers' psychological well-being, digital media use, and parenting practices, with a particular focus on specific aspects of media use. Caregivers (n = 549) with at least two children aged 5–18 participated in a multinational project examining family functioning and well-being amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents completed questionnaires assessing their psychological distress, media use habits, and parenting practices. Comparisons of structural regression models revealed that operationalizing caregivers' media use as a single general construct disregards important nuances in its relations to psychological distress and parenting.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges for adolescents, who tended to experience more emotional instability, impulsivity, and aggressive behavior driven by the fear of infection and the uncertainty of network information. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between Internet addiction and aggressive behavior, and the mediating effects of depression and anxiety. There were differences in Internete addiction and aggressive behavior in gender, thus the moderating role of gender between them were explored. A total of 1148 middle school students were invited to complete the Buss Perry Aggression Questionnaire, the Internet Addition Scale, the Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS), and the Self-rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) separately.

Usage of YouTube for educational purposes became particularly relevant for teenagers as a support for their home-schooling. This study aimed to find out what strategies teenagers use to find relevant educational content on the service and how important this content was for their everyday learning practices before and during the COVID pandemic. It analyzed online behavior of 34, 14 to 15-year old teenagers (47% male) who took part in a long-term adventure trip with digital media left aside. It gathered quantitative data seven months before the trip (March 2019), just before the trip (October 2019), on the last day of the trip (April 2020), and five months after the trip (September 2020). It also conducted in-depth interviews with nine teenagers, who named YouTube as their favourite online service. Our intention is now to conduct nine additional interviews with the same teenagers to see whether their everyday learning practices changed within the last year. Implications drawn from this study, further research perspectives, and limitations will be presented and discussed.

The present study has been done to understand the relationship of internet addiction and online gaming with peer pressure, personality and general health between adolescents and young adults. The objective of this study is to find if there is any relationship between internet net addiction and online gaming with peer pressure openness to change and general health along with levels of internet addiction among young adults and adolescents. Method: correlational design was used.  The sample consisted of a total of 155 subjects with adolescents (75) and young adults (80) within the age group of 14-25 years old out of which 82 are females and 73 were males. Data was collected mostly from school, college, and working groups, through the Simple Random Sampling technique.

This research examines the implementation of technology-based learning, such as the use of android, personal computers, and IPads. The action of this research is the use of digital technology for early childhood on the role of parents during the COVID-19 pandemic. This method was chosen because the researcher wanted to identify the parents' responses through a questionnaire on the use of technology as well as some of the roles of parents towards their children during taking advantage of this technology. That way, the survey method is considered very suitable to be used and in line with the function of survey research, namely to collect and explain opinions or opinions from a group of people (samples) on a particular topic. The number of samples in this study was 385 respondents (parents). The simple random technique is the sampling technique of choice used by researchers in sampling. Location research is Bahawalpur City. This research data was obtained online through the google forms platform. The instrument used is a questionnaire regarding the use of technology through the role of parents. The statements in this research questionnaire are 10 statements. There are five Likert scales used, namely very often (5), often (4), sometimes (3), never (2), and never (1).

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on families’ daily routines and psychosocial well-being, and technology has played a key role in providing socially distanced health care services. The first objective of this paper was to describe the content and delivery of a single-session, internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy (iCBT) intervention, which has been developed to help parents cope with children’s anxiety and manage daily situations with their children. The second objective was to report user adherence and satisfaction among the first participants who completed the intervention.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the transition of online learning introduces challenges for adolescents to engage in learning. The increased access and persistent Internet use could heighten the risk of problematic Internet use (PIU) that has been increasingly recognized as a risk factor for academic engagement. This study aims to investigate the direct and indirect relationships between PIU and academic engagement through psychopathological symptoms (i.e., depression, anxiety, insomnia) in early, middle, and late adolescence. In all, 4852 adolescents (51.5% females; Mage = 13.80 ± 2.38) from different regions of Chinese mainland participated in the study and completed questionnaires.

The aim of this study was to investigate screen media use and sleep patterns among Spanish adolescents during the lockdown (LD) of the first peak of the coronavirus pandemic. Cross-sectional community-based study of adolescents aged 11–18 years. An online questionnaire with queries about screen time, sleep, and other healthy habits was completed by parents or guardians.

Recognition that access to digital connectivity, tools and services is fundamental to inclusion and participation in society has grown exponentially over the last five years, including for persons affected by forced displacement and socially disadvantaged young people. This report presents findings from a rapid qualitative research assessment of UNICEF Jordan’s digital inclusion programme for vulnerable Jordanians, Palestinian and Syrian refugees attending Makani centres undertaken in July and August 2021. The programme distributed tablets and 10GB of monthly data to 10,000 vulnerable households in order to help address the digital divide and support access to online education and learning as well to life skills and other non-formal education programming. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with adolescents and their parents, this report explores the effects that the tablet distribution initiative has had in terms of education and learning, access to information and services, as well as to peers and mentors.

Recently, sexual health scholars have expressed concerns regarding adolescents’ use of sexually explicit internet materials (SEIM) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, using latent growth curve modeling, the current study explored adolescents’ changes in the frequency of SEIM use before, during, and after a strict lockdown period was established in Belgium. Attention was given to individual differences (i.e., gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pubertal timing, and sensation seeking). A three-wave panel study over a 15-month period among 522 adolescents was used (Mage = 15.36, SD = 1.51, 67.1% girls).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, internet use and gaming of adolescents had been elevated. On the one hand, internet use and gaming in the period was a good approach to killing quarantined time. However, the increased use of the internet and game of adolescents may also increase the risk of internet addiction. This study aimed to describe the internet behavior changes of adolescents and to understand the impact of clinical features on internet addiction after the adolescents back to school in COVID-19 period. It conducted a cross-sectional cohort study using data collected through online investigation in China. Six hundred and twenty-five adolescents completed the online survey.