Children and COVID-19 Research Library

Young people have been among the hardest hit groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, experiencing disruptions to their education and facing challenging transitions to the labour market (Wilson & Papoutsaki, 2021). This paper analyses data from research conducted by the Institute of Employment Studies (IES) during the pandemic involving 1,345 young people aged 16-25, both in education, employment and not in education, training or employment across the UK, at different points in time (April-September 2021). The mixed-method research adopted a youth-centred approach to explore the impact of the pandemic on young people’s experience of careers support. The analysis gives young people a voice and highlights three key ways in which access to careers support can be improved. These findings have implications for leaders across government and education around the development young people’s careers support following the pandemic.

Digital citizenship is understood as an urgent educational priority in an information age. Organizations working across the sector have argued for the need for greater digital literacy and digital citizenship education of children and young people so they can harness the educational, civic and economic opportunities of an increasingly connected world, while also learning skills to protect themselves from online risks and harms. This report presents findings from the ‘Mapping and review of online resources for, and perceived needs among vulnerable and marginalized young people in the Asia-Pacific region on digital literacy, safety and participation’ commissioned by UNESCO and UNDP. This rapid assessment aims to understand the needs of LGBTI young people and Young Key Populations (YKP) in the AIDS response in the Asia-Pacific region, in their quest for more secure digital spaces and improved experiences of digital citizenship. The assessment will also act as key guidance material for Youth-led organizations (Youth Lead and Y-Peer) to develop their own tools and resources for their communities and support grassroot level organizations to build online platforms for advocacy.

More than 25% of East Java regencies and cities had stunting prevalence rates higher than the national figure. The involvement of the youths to reduce stunting is important in helping to overcome this national health problem. This study aimed to identify areas in East Java that have stunting prevalence rates above the national rate and assisted in the preparation of a program called the Youth Empowerment for Stunting Reduction Program (YESREP). This descriptive study used document review by PRISMA stages. At the initial stage, 453 documents were filtered from Google Scholar (n=29), Pubmed (n=12), SagePub (n=20), Semantic Scholar (n=6), others (n =136), while the remaining (n=260) were discarded. The search keywords were ’youth empowerment’, ‘stunting’, and ‘Covid-19’. The inclusion criteria were stunting cases, youth empowerment, and the Covid-19 pandemic. The documents screened were journals with quantitative, qualitative, document review methods, year of publication:2017-2022, focusing on youth empowerment and stunting, and in English or Indonesian languages. The tool used for the final document selection used PICOT model.

Governments introduced protective public health measures, including lockdowns and social distancing, in response to the unprecedented global crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. For young people, such measures are particularly painful, as they entail an interruption of their transitions to adulthood, which generally require taking up their position in the public space and emerging as a recognised social peer, either through leaving the parental home, initiating an intimate relationship or getting a full-time job. In Portugal, where such transitions are often postponed, and young people cohabit with parents for much longer, lockdown meant withdrawal from the public space and living in an intensive family collective. This brought many challenges and created tension. Based on the results of a non-representative online survey on the impacts of the pandemic in Portugal, this article focuses how young people aged 16–24 adapted to the 2020 lockdown, using the conceptual lens of familialism. The results show that familialism remains a key support system in adversity, evidencing intergenerational solidarity through everyday practices of resilience and (self-) care, renewing and remaking social bonds. Individual distancing practices are deployed backstage, however, mitigating and nuancing the overwhelming hold of familialism.

During the Covid-19 crisis, stereotypical images of young people as selfish troublemakers or passive victims appeared in the media and scholarly publications. These persistent views disregard many young people's authentic experiences and civic contributions. This article challenges these perceptions by highlighting young people's acts of citizenship during the pandemic lockdowns that took place during 2020 in Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite being internationally praised for its compliant Covid-19 response, citizens were prepared to challenge the pandemic restrictions in order to have their voices heard. Young people were often at the forefront of these protests, wanting to actively participate in matters that concerned them by joining Black Lives Matter marches or campaigning to lower the voting age. At the same time, young people engaged in more personal and invisible acts of citizenship within their families and school communities. This article shares evidence from our empirical study into young people's social and political engagement during the Covid-19 lockdowns in Aotearoa New Zealand. Implications of this study for citizenship education are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought challenges for the mental health of young people. The volume, negative content and potential for misinformation within COVID-19 related news can be an additional cause of distress. This systematic review aims to synthesise the research findings on the relationship between COVID-19 news and distress in young people. Following the PRISMA guidelines, PubMed, Web of Science, and PsycINFO databases were searched on 24 April 2021 for articles that contained empirical research examining the association between COVID-19 news consumption and mental health in samples of young people with a mean age between 10 and 24 years.