Children and COVID-19 Research Library

From March 2020, Australia introduced a range of policies to respond to COVID-19, most of which impacted significantly on the lives of children. This article applies a child-centred framework, developed from rights-based participatory research with children, to analyse how children have been represented in policy narratives around COVID-19 and the extent to which policy responses have been child-inclusive or child-centred.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and because of the critical and essential nature of child welfare work, this workforce moved out of agency settings to remote work. Drawing from the theory of large systems change, this study explored child welfare caseworkers’ perspectives on how organizational changes due to the pandemic affected them as workers and their recommendations for sustained organizational change in child welfare. This narrative analysis explored secondary data collected in May 2020 about workforce needs related to the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 783). Regarding the impact of COVID-19, three themes emerged: (a) job impact (no change, limited change or positive outcome); (b) challenges (engaging with clients, conducting assessments, meeting with families, and using technology); and (c) impact on worker well-being (safety concerns, job stress, anxiety about the future). Three themes also emerged for recommendations for permanent workplace changes: (a) workplace flexibility (work from home, hybrid schedule); (b) better use of technology (virtual meetings and supporting remote access), and (c) worker well-being (support for worker safety and work–life balance and integration).

During the first wave of COVID-19 there was little evidence to guide appropriate child and family programs and policy supports. This study compared policies and programs implemented to support early child health and well-being during the first wave of COVID-19 in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Singapore, the UK, and the USA. Program and policy themes were focused on prenatal care, well-baby visits and immunization schedules, financial supports, domestic violence and housing, childcare supports, child protective services, and food security.

The expansion of the UK’s support for families with children from the late 1990s was put into reverse over the decade from 2010. Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, parents may have felt that they had less support from the government and increased private responsibility in bringing up the next generation. Drawing on qualitative interviews with parents in England and Scotland claiming Universal Credit, this article analyses parenting experiences for low-income families during the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular concerning the costs of looking after children, caring for children, and family relationships/mental health.

COVID-19 has had a huge impact on the social, cultural, economic, education, tourism, trade and other sectors in Indonesia. Of all of these, health and humanitarian issues are those most highlighted. This research involved a literature search of books, journal articles and manuscripts of government regulations. Discussing the death rate from COVID-19 is not only a question of how many people have lost their lives in Indonesia due to contracting the disease, but also of the conditions and survival of the families left behind, especially children who have lost their parents due to COVID-19. The psychological aspects of the families of COVID-19 victims have often been neglected. As yet, the Government still largely focuses on the sick or dead and has not paid much attention to the bereaved families, especially children, who are in dire need of assistance. In Indonesia, there are 11,045 children who have become orphans, fatherless, or motherless because their parents or caregivers died due to COVID-19.1 This raises concerns regarding how their clothing, food and shelter needs can be met, along with their needs related to the rights to education, physical and psychological health, and security and safety. Therefore, procedures, coordination, schemes for protecting children’s rights, and mitigation actions involving public policies must notice and meet the needs of children who have lost their parents due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article summarizes key research findings about academic learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic and how public libraries can help youth with learning remediation and acceleration. Given the educational crisis, it is urgent that public library services and programs create more equitable practices for all children, particularly children of color. Finally, the article highlights specific practices instituted by several library systems that address COVID-related learning loss and are aligned to two areas of national priority: summer learning and out-of-school time.

Financing quality social services will require increased public investment and greater mobilization of both domestic and international resources in the post-COVID era. Currently, low- and middle-income countries invest, on average, just one third of their total government expenditure in social spending on education, health and social protection. However, the fiscal space to enhance social spending remains constrained in many parts of the world. Given the scale of the challenge facing many countries, a renewed focus on financing social spending is needed to address widening inequalities. This policy brief is the second in a series that assesses key issues affecting social spending as part of UNICEF’s work on Public Finance for Children. The brief examines how recent trends are impacting on the financing available for, and directed to, social spending in low- and middle-income countries in different regions, using secondary analysis of public expenditure data collected by international organizations. It calculates median spending figures by region and income group, using World Bank regional aggregates for domestic spending.

This article focuses on the challenges same-sex-parent families in Italy have faced in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. It is universally acknowledged that Italy was the first victim of the novel coronavirus in Europe. Due to the hazards caused by the pandemic, the Italian government implemented a series of countermeasures to help families, resolving the increasingly irreconcilable conflicts between work and childcare, providing financing to the most poverty-stricken families. However, some initiatives have made it clear that in Italy, not all people have received equal benefits. To further investigate and bring awareness to the issue of the vulnerability of Italian same-sex-parent families in times of COVID-19, 40 in-depth interviews were conducted online between March and June 2020 to collect data on attitudes, opinions, and behaviors at the individual level.

This paper explores the interlinks between multiple layers of exclusion and deprivation of Roma adolescents mothers in the context of COVID-19 pandemic, in order to understand: a) how different types of exclusion (e.g., digital, social, educational) overlap and how are those types of exclusion lived and perceived by teenage mothers; and b) whether and how the COVID-19 pandemic changed existing inequalities in their situation. In our paper, we refer to teenage mothers to describe mothers who gave birth before the age of 18. The study has a qualitative exploratory approach and relies on ten interviews conducted with Roma teenage mothers in peripheral urban areas in Romania during COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in the Spring of 2020. As a theoretical framework, the study employs the Relative Digital Deprivation Theory, (Helsper, 2016) which touches upon three dimensions of digital divides while revealing different markers of agency that young mothers manifest.

From March 2020 to April 2021 the Humanitarian Leadership Academy (HLA) delivered 81 learning solutions as a capacity strengthening response to the COVID19 pandemic. They varied from digital learning pathways to one off webinars or programme adaptations, together bringing the digital learning audience of more than 18,000, in addition to engaging with 39 Save the Children Country Offices (COs). The Save the Children (SC) staff was the primary audience of most of those interventions, but some open access courses have had most engagement (COVID19 Learning Pathway, Integrated Public Health Hub, webinar series). This work has happened against the backdrop of the global public health crisis, that unlike previous emergencies directly impacted the HLA team, posing new challenges in terms of delivery.

This paper investigates the effect of parents’ coproduction in online schooling on satisfaction with educational services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using European cross country microdata from the 2020 Eurofound survey, it reveals that parents’ involvement in home schooling is strongly correlated with their satisfaction with educational services. These results contribute to the on-going debate regarding the importance of citizens’ involvement in service delivery during the pandemic, and, in particular, on the related effects in terms of subjective satisfaction.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of childcare to national economies in general and women's economic participation in particular, spurring renewed interest in childcare policy in many countries that have implemented lockdowns. This paper adopts a circle of care framework to analyzes how COVID-19 has affected paid childcare, unpaid childcare and other paid work, and the relationship between these sectors. Analysis is grounded in the lived experiences of parents and childcare educators, documented through 16 semi-structured interviews during the initial lockdown (March–June 2020) in British Columbia, Canada. Experiences from educators suggest their safety was not prioritized, and that their contributions were undervalued and went unrecognized. Mothers, who provided the majority of unpaid care, not only lost income due to care demands, but struggled to access necessities, with some reporting increased personal insecurity. Those attempting to work from home also experienced feelings of guilt and distress as they tried to manage the triple burden. Similarities of experiences across the circle of care suggest the COVID-19 childcare policy response in BC Canada downloaded care responsibilities on to women without corresponding recognition or support, causing women to absorb the costs of care work, with potential long-term negative effects on women's careers and well-being, as well as on the resilience of the circle of care.

Health Sector Development Plans (HSDPs) aim to accelerate movement towards achieving sustainable development goals for health, reducing inequalities, and ending poverty. Reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (RMNCH) services are vulnerable to economic imbalances, including health insecurity, unmet need for healthcare, and low health expenditure. The same vulnerability influences the potential of a country to combat global outbreaks such as the COVID-19. This paper aimed to provide some important insights into the impacts of COVID-19 on RMNCH indicators and outcomes of the HSDP in Uganda.