Children and COVID-19 Research Library

Mothers may be at risk for increasing substance use during the COVID-19 pandemic which could lead to negative health consequences for the mother herself as well as her developing child. This study aims to examine group differences between mothers reporting decreased, increased, or no change to their substance use and identify risk and protective factors that influence retrospectively-reported changes in substance use during the COVID-19 pandemic in a sample of mothers with young children.

Given the range of negative consequences related to the pandemic and the evolving supports available to families, child protection workers needed a clinical tool to guide and support work with families informed by an understanding of economic hardship. The objective of this paper is to report on the development and implementation strategy of a tool to be used for practice intervention during the pandemic.

This goal of this research is to provide a cursory analysis of publicly available child maltreatment data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of total allegations of child maltreatment between the months of March and June—a span of time representative of the COVID-19 pandemic thus far—were analyzed in five different states in the years 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. An analysis of total numbers of allegations and the percentage change in allegations per year revealed a disproportionate decline in child maltreatment reports during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper explores patterns of increased/ decreased physical activity, sedentary and sleep behaviours among Canadian children and youth aged 5-17 years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and examines how these changes are associated with the built environment near residential locations.

Given the range of negative consequences related to the pandemic and the evolving supports available to families, child protection workers needed a clinical tool to guide and support work with families informed by an understanding of economic hardship. The objective of this paper is to report on the development and implementation strategy of a tool to be used for practice intervention during the pandemic.

This study aims to document the gendered experience of the lockdown and its association with depressive symptoms among graduate students in Quebec. The policy measures taken after the COVID-19 were not gender- neutral. This study demonstrates the importance of taking gendered effects of policies into consideration, and points to mitigating actions that can forestall the exacerbation of gendered inequalities in mental health.

This study assessed symptoms of anxiety and depression among pregnant individuals during the current COVID-19 pandemic and determined factors that were associated with psychological distress. 1987 pregnant participants in Canada were surveyed in April 2020. The assessment included questions about COVID-19-related stress and standardized measures of depression, anxiety, pregnancy-related anxiety, and social support.

This article tries to provide parents with ideas on how to help children to adjust to school reopening.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown a markedly low proportion of cases among children. Age disparities in observed cases could be explained by children having lower susceptibility to infection, lower propensity to show clinical symptoms or both. We evaluate these possibilities by fitting an age-structured mathematical model to epidemic data from China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Canada and South Korea. We estimate that susceptibility to infection in individuals under 20 years of age is approximately half that of adults aged over 20 years, and that clinical symptoms manifest in 21% (95% credible interval: 12–31%) of infections in 10- to 19-year-olds, rising to 69% (57–82%) of infections in people aged over 70 years. Accordingly, we find that interventions aimed at children might have a relatively small impact on reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission, particularly if the transmissibility of subclinical infections is low. Our age-specific clinical fraction and susceptibility estimates have implications for the expected global burden of COVID-19, as a result of demographic differences across settings. In countries with younger population structures—such as many low-income countries—the expected per capita incidence of clinical cases would be lower than in countries with older population structures, although it is likely that comorbidities in low-income countries will also influence disease severity. Without effective control measures, regions with relatively older populations could see disproportionally more cases of COVID-19, particularly in the later stages of an unmitigated epidemic.

Healthy childhood development is fostered through sufficient physical activity (PA; including time outdoors), limiting sedentary behaviours (SB), and adequate sleep; collectively known as movement behaviours. Though the COVID-19 virus outbreak has changed the daily lives of children and youth, it is unknown to what extent related restrictions may compromise the ability to play and meet movement behaviour recommendations. This secondary data analysis examined the immediate impacts of COVID-19 restrictions on movement and play behaviours in children and youth.