Children and COVID-19 Research Library

In 2019, 135 million people in 55 countries were in food crises or worse, and 2 billion people did not have regular access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food. COVID-19 has exacerbated these hardships and may result in an additional 121 million people facing acute food insecurity by the end of 2020. Further, since the beginning of the pandemic, an estimated 1.6 billion learners in 199 countries worldwide were affected by school closures, with nearly 370 million children not receiving a school meal in 150 countries.

The paper presents the evidence on the potential negative short-term and long-term effects of school meal scheme disruption during Covid-19 globally. It shows how vulnerable the children participating in these schemes are, how coping and mitigation measures are often only short-term solutions, and how prioritizing school re-opening is critical. For instance, it highlights how girls are at greater risk of not being in school or of being taken out of school early, which may lead to poor nutrition and health for themselves and their children. However, well-designed school feeding programmes have been shown to enable catch-up from early growth failure and other negative shocks. As such, once schools re-open, school meal schemes can help address the deprivation that children have experienced during the closures and provide an incentive for parents to send and keep their children, especially girls, in school.

COVID-19 is creating a girls’ education crisis in Ethiopia, threatening to reverse the country’s recent progress towards gender equality in education. Over the last two decades, the Ethiopian government has expanded its education system and made important gains for girls at the primary and secondary levels. The net enrolment rate in elementary school increased from 29% in 1989 to 86% in 2017. The same year the Gender Parity Index also reached 0.90 at the primary level and 0.87 at the secondary level. However, harmful traditional practices, social norms and poverty continue to prevent girls from completing their education, resulting in high dropout rates at the secondary level.

To control the COVID-19 outbreak in Japan, sports and entertainment events were canceled and schools were closed throughout Japan from February 26 through March 19. That policy has been designated as voluntary event cancellation and school closure (VECSC). This study assesses VECSC effectiveness based on predicted outcomes. A simple susceptible–infected–recovered model was applied to data of patients with symptoms in Japan during January 14 through March 26. The respective reproduction numbers for periods before VECSC (R0), during VECSC (Re), and after VECSC (Ra) were estimated.

In response to the spread of SARS‐CoV‐2 and the impact of COVID‐19, national and subnational governments implemented a variety of measures in order to control the spread of the virus and the associated disease. While these measures were imposed with the intention of controlling the pandemic, they were also associated with severe psychosocial, societal, and economic implications on a societal level. One setting affected heavily by these measures is the school setting. By mid‐April 2020, 192 countries had closed schools, affecting more than 90% of the world’s student population. In consideration of the adverse consequences of school closures, many countries around the world reopened their schools in the months after the initial closures. To safely reopen schools and keep them open, governments implemented a broad range of measures. The evidence with regards to these measures, however, is heterogeneous, with a multitude of study designs, populations, settings, interventions and outcomes being assessed. To make sense of this heterogeneity, we conducted a rapid scoping review (8 October to 5 November 2020). This rapid scoping review is intended to serve as a precursor to a systematic review of effectiveness, which will inform guidelines issued by the World Health Organization (WHO). 

The quick spread of COVID‐19 has caused part of the world's population to adopt quarantine protocols that have limited professional activities, including dental training programmes. This study aimed to explore the experiences of students and personnel at a Chilean dental school during the COVID‐19 pandemic.

Young people have been among those most socially affected by the COVID-19 pandemic but, at the same time, also the most prepared to cope with the quick shift towards virtual environments that the pandemic created. For many young people in the Europe and Central Asia Region, COVID-19 interrupted their schooling, left them jobless, and has made it more difficult to integrate into the labour market. Facing school closures and uncertainty about their futures, young people say that they feel isolated and are dealing with levels of stress, anxiety and depression. UNICEF and the European Training Foundation (ETF) have partnered to examine the challenges, opportunities and – most importantly – the sentiments and views of young people concerning their current and future prospects in the time of COVID-19. 

The coronavirus pandemic 2019 (COVID-19) changed the context of schooling for both parents and their children. Learning at home presents new challenges for parents of young children and particularly for parents of children with behavior difficulties, such as inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. The current study examined changes to parent and child behavior due to COVID-19 among 4- and 5-year-old children and their parents. Changes in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and levels of parental involvement in children’s learning were examined. ADHD symptoms were also examined as a moderator of changes in parent involvement. Data were collected prior to COVID-19 and several months after school closures.

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed severe restrictions on people’s behavior worldwide with school closures in many countries. These closures have shifted education from the classroom to the home. This change is unprecedented, and home-schooling has placed substantial stress on families across the world. As of 9 April 2020, 1.57 billion children were being educated by families that had little or no experience of protracted home-schooling. An essential but neglected issue related to COVID-19 is the psychological impact of home-schooling on family wellbeing, especially considering the other stressors they are experiencing including social isolation, fears of infection, frustration, boredom, inadequate information, and financial stress. This study explores the impact of home-schooling on family psychological wellbeing during COVID-19. These findings will help develop supports and interventions for this population.

Food insecurity, and particularly child hunger, has been a source of growing social and political concern for the best part of a decade. There are fears that COVID-19, and the economic shutdowns brought in its wake, will make it even worse. That has drawn substantial public attention to the issue – not least as a result of a high-profile campaign from Marcus Rashford and his Child Food Poverty Taskforce and subsequent changes in Government policy on support for children in England on free school meals through the school holidays. Campaigners have long argued that there is inadequate data on food insecurity and child hunger in the UK. In 2019, the Government incorporated a battery of questions on the topic into its Family Resources Survey. However, the 2019/20 results will not be published until March 2021, and it will be 2022 until we have data covering the period of the pandemic. In this report, we attempt to fill that breach, providing initial findings on the level of food insecurity in the UK, as well as the impact of the pandemic.

Families and school districts face challenges balancing COVID-19 mitigation and school reopening. Among parents of school-aged children who participated in an Internet panel survey, racial and ethnic minority parents were more concerned about some aspects of school reopening, such as compliance with mitigation measures, safety, and their child contracting or bringing home COVID-19, than were non-Hispanic White parents. Understanding racial/ethnic differences in parental attitudes and concerns about school reopening can inform communication and mitigation strategies and highlights the importance of considering risks for severe COVID-19 and family resource needs when developing options for school attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the new coronavirus rapidly spread across the globe, the impact of the virus on children was still unclear, and closing schools seemed the responsible thing to do. But much has been learnt since about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the effects of lockdown and school closures, both in South Africa and internationally. This article aims  to show that the mortality risk of the virus is extremely small for children, even when assuming an extremely pessimistic scenario for total COVID-19 deaths.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown has shattered the everyday lives of young people, limiting peer interactions and disrupting privacy, with potential for long-term detrimental impacts. This study uses rapid virtual quantitative and qualitative surveys undertaken from April to July 2020 with over 4,800 adolescents affected by displacement in Bangladesh and Jordan to explore adolescent girls’ experiences of social isolation and lack of privacy.

The outbreaks of Covid-19 influence the Indonesian education nationally, including early childhood education (PAUD). Since the school closures in March, the teachers have attempted to implement the distance learning. This study is conducted in a school in Kendal. The teacher shared her experiences in conducting the learning based on the emergency curriculum. It is found that the government has given the support by publishing the twelve books for the learning at home policy and providing the internet data. Most of the books are about playing with children and positive communication. Parents’ roles in distance learning have greater proportion than the teachers. Parents in this situation have the duties to supervise the learning, to conduct the learning, and to assist teachers in assessment. The teachers construct the weekly lesson plan, communicate the steps of learning process, and evaluate the students’ progress. However, both teachers and parents experience barriers due to the lack of skills in using technology and inability to provide learning materials to support six aspects of child development.

 

Although youth report many positive experiences with social media (SM) use in their daily lives, adolescents with depression are more vulnerable to the risks of SM use than adolescents without depression. Parents protect adolescents with depression from the risks of SM use by monitoring their child’s SM activity; however, this comes into conflict with the adolescent’s need for autonomy in their web-based communication. The implications of SM use and monitoring for adolescents with depression and their parents are of particular relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic, as rates of SM use have increased in response to physical distancing measures. Objective: This study aims to explore parent and child perspectives regarding the use and function of SM in the daily lives of adolescents with depression and parents’ perceptions of and experience with monitoring their child’s SM use.

To clarify the physical and mental conditions of children during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and consequent social distancing in relation to the mental condition of their caregivers. This internet-based nationwide cross-sectional study was conducted between April 30 and May 13, 2020. The participants were 1,200 caregivers of children aged 3–14 years. Child health issues were categorized into “at least one” or “none” according to caregivers’ perception. Caregivers’ mental status was assessed using the Japanese version of the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale-6.