Children and COVID-19 Research Library

The COVID-19 pandemic and global lockdowns fundamentally changed families’ everyday lives. This study aims to examine how families with children coped during the COVID-19 lockdown in Finland and what kind of coping strategies they developed. An online survey including both qualitative and quantitative questions was conducted between April and May 2020 to gather Finnish families’ experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown. Huston’s social-ecological theory was used as an analytical framework. 

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has forced parents and children to adopt significant changes in their daily routine, which has been a big challenge for families, with important implications for family stress. This study aims to analyze the potential risk and protective factors for parents’ and children’s well-being during a potentially traumatic event such as the COVID-19 quarantine. Specifically, it investigates parents’ and children’s well-being, parental stress, and children’s resilience. The study involved 463 Italian parents of children aged 5–17.

Everybody agrees that the COVID-19 pandemic is a big disruption in education. It questions many traditional rules and structures that have organised the work of schools in the past. But not everyone agrees that the pandemic will eventually change schools. This article tries to determine whether the pandemic will help us fix some of the preexisting inequalities that we were unable, and often unwilling, to improve. It also argues that as we think about how education should be reimagined, it is paramount to continue efforts to make education more inclusive, fairer and equitable for all. Two examples from two distinct education systems, Australia and Finland, are used to highlight how disrupted teaching caused by school closures has had different impacts on schools and teachers.

Inequity in routine childhood vaccination coverage is well researched. Pandemics disrupt infrastructure and divert health resources from preventive care, including vaccination programmes, leading to increased vaccine preventable morbidity and mortality. COVID-19 control measures have resulted in coverage reductions. We conducted a rapid review of the impact of pandemics on existing inequities in routine vaccination coverage. PICO search framework: Population: children 0–18 years; Intervention/exposure: pandemic/epidemic; Comparison: inequality; Outcome: routine vaccination coverage. The review demonstrates a gap in the literature as none of the 29 papers selected for full-paper review from 1973 abstracts identified from searches met the inclusion criteria.

In 2005, Michael Marmot introduced the concept of the Social Determinants of Health (SDH) in which he proposed what was in plain sight, i.e., that health outcomes are determined by “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age”. For children, these social determinants influence life opportunities, disease profiles, health outcomes, and life expectancy. Since the initial paper, there has been little progress in addressing the social determinants of health. In a review in 2010, Marmot concluded that social and economic status determines the health outcomes, and the lower the socioeconomic status the worse the outcome. Now, in the midst of a pandemic, the importance of considering the SDH in pediatric research has been highlighted once more by SARS‑CoV-2. In societies affected by the virus, those who suffer inequity and who are negatively influenced by the SDH have been most severely affected. This paper covers the key areas that require attention as we move to the post COVID era.

COVID-19 and its direct and indirect economic impacts particularly affect rural populations, leading to an increase in hunger and poverty. To cope with this situation, rural households may likely resort to using child labour among other negative coping strategies, facilitated by the closure of schools in response to the spread of the virus. The prevalence of child labour remains high in agricultural sub-sectors. Because social protection coverage remains limited and cash payments and other types of support to subsistence farmers, forest communities, fisherfolk and artisanal fishers are often scarce or irregular, FAO encourages the expansion of social protection to rural areas as an effective strategy for eliminating child labour. This information note aims at outlining what are child labour and social protection, how social protection can significantly contribute to eliminating child labour in agriculture, and what are FAO’s planned efforts to leverage on social protection interventions to generate knowledge and increase impact at country level on child labour elimination. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has created the largest disruption of education systems in history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion school-age children in more than 190 countries. Already last year, 250 million school-age children being out of school, the world was facing a “learning crisis”. But now with the COVID-19 pandemic, this crisis could turn into a generational catastrophe. While many children will continue with their education once schools reopen, others may never return to school. Current estimates indicate that 24 million children will never return to the classroom and among those, disproportional number of girls. To avert this crisis, we need to reimagine how we deliver good quality and inclusive education to the world children. Among other things, this calls for urgent investments in school health and nutrition programmes and create the conditions for children to lead healthy lives. This also includes health and nutrition literacy offered through the curriculum and through counselling in the school health services which provides young people with knowledge, skills, values, culture and behaviours they need to lead healthy, empowered lives.

Adolescent girls' education contributes to a virtuous cycle that has proven positive impact on sustainable development. This report aims to examine progress and persistent gaps in our efforts to achieve gender equality in and through education since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in 1995, and to identify priority actions to be implemented within the Beijing+25 process, the Generation Equality Forum's Action Coalitions, and the Sustainable Development Goals. It shows the importance of adolescent girls' education and provides recommendations for collective action – in particular on three priority levers: Comprehensive sexuality education; the participation of adolescent girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM); and the development of adolescent girls' leadership – drawing in particular on consultation processes among international organizations, civil society and adolescent girls in the run-up to the Forum. In all areas, specific levers, intersectoral approaches and multi-stakeholder partnerships are promoted.

Women and girls in Bangladesh are facing increased domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is highlighting pre-existing systemic barriers to legal recourse, protection, and social services. This crisis comes as Bangladesh marks the anniversaries of two landmark pieces of legislation on gender-based violence (GBV) and enters the final phase of its plan to build a society free of violence against women and children. Despite this, evidence shows that women and girls still face extreme levels of violence. It is also apparent that survivors of GBV have little or no access to support or legal recourse. This report draws on 50 interviews to document the obstacles to realizing the Bangladeshi government’s goal of a society without violence against women and children. It presents key findings, as well as recommendations on how to move forward.

In addition to its immediate adverse impact on women’s and girls’ health and education, the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to further exacerbate existing gender inequalities in economic opportunities across Sub-Saharan Africa. This brief highlight evidence from the Africa Gender Innovation Lab and other promising research on mechanisms that can help protect the lives and livelihoods of women and girls - at the household level, in firms and farms, and during adolescence - in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. While these interventions focus on improving economic and social outcomes for women, many of them also have positive impacts for men. 

This paper is focused on answering the following questions: How are poor families surviving in this era of COVID-19? What is life for children from poor families? What has become of their reality? To understand the realities of poor families and children during COVID-19, specifically in Ghana, this paper aims to analyze how COVID-19 has affected children from poor families in Ghana and how welfare institutions can work to provide rapid help to such families.

Household food insecurity, an inability to provide adequate nutrition for a healthy, active lifestyle, affects nearly 1 in 7 households with children in the United States. Though rates of food insecurity declined to pre-recession levels just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, they are now once again increasing. As a result, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, millions of young children continue to grow up in households that struggle daily with a problem that is often associated with the developing world. The result is both immediate and long- term health and development deficits for children.

The present study sought to examine the impact of COVID-19 in 77 ethnically, linguistically and socioeconomically diverse families with young children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDDs) in California and Oregon, who were participating in larger intervention studies. Results suggest that parents of young children with IDD report significant challenges at home during the pandemic. Professional support, especially during the reopening phases, will be critical to support family well‐being and child developmental outcomes.

This commentary is focused on the impact the pandemic has had in highlighting disparities related to sociodemographic and environmental factors for children and their families. Highly populated counties with poor air quality, multigenerational households in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods lead to increase community spread of COVID-19 with an increased risk of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 due to inability to enact physical distancing restrictions. Children with disabilities have a unique challenge during the current pandemic, as isolating measures such as school closures lead to creation of protective home environments that have been shown to decrease risk of contraction of COVID-19, unless living in crowded living environments.

Currently, as COVID-19 spreads across the world, an unprecedented 76.7 million people are living as refugees, or have been displaced inside their countries. Some 131 of the countries affected by COVID-19 have sizeable refugee populations and more than 80% of refugees are hosted in low- and middle-income countries including Uganda, Sudan, Pakistan and Turkey, with health systems that are ill-equipped to manage significant outbreaks. Refugee and IDP camps are mostly chronically overcrowded and measures to avoid community transmission of the virus, such as physical distancing and frequent handwashing, are difficult to implement. The absence of basic amenities, such as clean running water and soap, insufficient medical personnel, and poor access to health information, let alone access to masks, will make avoiding infection virtually impossible. Also, in many host countries, refugees’ entitlement to healthcare and social protection systems are restricted or non-existent, which increases their vulnerability even further.