Children and COVID-19 Research Library

The experience of Covid-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2020 has been strongly shaped by a narrative emanating from a robust partnership between politicians and public health experts. This narrative treads a careful line between hard and soft responses. To elaborate, enacting policy such as closing borders and requiring ‘lockdown’ was swift and firm but was accompanied by an attempt to develop a disposition of care and empathy towards the public. While there has been hardship for some families, the soft messaging has, we argue, led to aspects of the response that have been decidedly child-friendly. At the regional scale, border closures have impacted heavily on Pacific Island families, separating families as parents have been unable to return to their home islands and through the loss of economic opportunities associated with seasonal work and in local - often tourism dominated economies. In a COVID-era the future looks uncertain for children both within New Zealand and in the wider Pacific realm.

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting economic crisis, UNICEF in the Republic of Moldova commissioned research to assess the impact of the reduced flow of remittances on families with children in the areas of health, education, nutrition and other child related social services, and to drive the development of an equity-focused and gender-sensitive midterm mitigation plan. The report revealed that worryingly, 15 per cent of households with children have even had to cut down on meals, especially expensive categories of food such as meat, fish, fruit and vegetables.

The United Nations Leave No One Behind, A Call-to-Action pledges and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are the formulating structure of this article. The commitments are documents to offer structure on how to eliminate poverty for all global citizens. The article aims to highlight where our urban areas and cities across the globe need improvement by eradicating discriminatory practices that affect women and trickle down to childcare and education of their children to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) the year 2030, amidst COVID-19.

The economic impacts of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) have drastically increased food insecurity in the United States. Initial data, collected a few months into the pandemic, showed that families, particularly those experiencing food insecurity, reported detrimental changes to their home food environment and parent feeding practices, compared to before COVID‐19. This follow‐up study obtained longitudinal data from a sample of parents in the United States to quantify changes in food security status, the home food environment, and parent feeding practices, from before to across COVID‐19 as the pandemic continued to persist.

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and attempts to limit its spread have resulted in a contraction of the global economy. This study documents the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic among households, adults and children in low-income countries. To do so, it relies on longitudinal household survey data from Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda, originating from pre-COVID-19 face-to-face household surveys plus phone surveys implemented during the pandemic. 256 million individuals—77% of the population—are estimated to live in households that have lost income during the pandemic. Attempts to cope with this loss are exacerbated by food insecurity and an inability to access medicine and staple foods. Finally, this study finds that student– teacher contact has dropped from a pre-COVID-19 rate of 96% to just 17% among households with school-aged children. These findings can inform decisions by governments and international organizations on measures to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The increase in malnutrition arising due to the coronavirus pandemic is expected to cause nearly 170,000 additional child deaths in the next two years. Please, read that again, and understand that we are in the middle of a crisis within a crisis. This pandemic has created a fatal cycle: malnourished people are at a higher risk of death or hospitalisation from COVID-19, and the lockdown measures necessary to tackle the virus make it more difficult for people to access healthcare facilities and proper food, thus pushing them closer to malnutrition. Since nutrition underpins all of human flourishing, people in these regions are also under great economic, social, environmental and health strains, and may sink deeper into poverty as a result . Both COVID-19 and malnutrition have intense, long-term impacts, and challenge our ability to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They are emergencies in the short and long term. To avoid this food crisis spiralling out of control, actions to prevent malnutrition must be adopted as an essential part of any COVID-19 response.

A year after - as the world still grapples with COVID-19, children and families' lives are being turned upside down with devastating impacts on children and their rights. From health systems are being overwhelmed, economies are sliding down, and children have had their education disrupted by school closures, these conditions affect children from around the world including children from the world’s poorest countries in Asia. To mark the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Save The Children Asia Team presents ‘Under the Same Sky: How a year of Covid-19 affected Asia-Pacific children’.​ This brief focuses on how children’s daily lives have changed, comparing how they spent a day before the pandemic and during it across the Asia region. It also reviews the impacts & changes to the lives of children in the past 1 year. Reflects on the impact of school closures, home isolation/quarantine, and community lockdown on children's wellbeing and education & health. It includes policy asks on the need for strengthening social protection systems for the most marginalized and vulnerable children in a post-pandemic world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended national development plans and is likely to derail the planned trajectories of most countries towards achieving the 2030 Agenda. Not only has it had a significant impact on the health and mental wellbeing of millions of people globally, but it has also set off a global economic crisis. UN Women and UNFPA have compiled an assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on gender equality in the East and Southern Africa region. The aim of the report is to outline the opportunities and constraints for gender equality and women’s empowerment in the post-COVID-19 recovery phase and identify the key gaps and challenges in current policies and programmes in the East and Southern Africa region.

This note introduces parental uncertainty into parent–child monetary transfers. A parent questions the probability distribution of a child’s future economic success. As a result, the parent endogenously tilts his/her subjective probability model away from an approximating probability model. In this case, parental transfers increase with model uncertainty, thereby reducing the child’s effort and probability of economic success. This theoretical result raises several empirical questions, of which two are as follows. For one thing, informed parents (e.g. those who hold the same job as their child) transfer less money, and their child exerts more effort. Another is that economic uncertainty (e.g. recessions or pandemics) prompts higher parental transfer payments and reduces the child’s effort.

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.

Emerging literature on the current COVID-19 crisis suggests that children may experience increased anxiety and depression as a result of the pandemic. To prevent such school and mental health-related problems, there is a timely need to develop preventive strategies and interventions to address potential negative impacts of COVID-19 on children’s mental health, especially in school settings. Results from previous child clinical research indicate that art-based therapies, including mindfulness-based art therapy, have shown promise to increase children’s well-being and reduce psychological distress.

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.