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Children and COVID-19 Research Library

UNICEF Innocenti's curated library of COVID-19 + Children research

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1 - 15 of 717
The onset of a pandemic: impact assessments and policy responses in Malaysia during the early months of COVID-19
Institution: United Nations Development Programme
Published: February 2023
This report is a call to action, to prepare for future crises, and the ones that we are experiencing today to tackle the multi-faceted social and economic dimensions of crises. It is, above all, a call to focus on people – women, youth, low-wage workers, small and medium enterprises, the informal sector and on vulnerable groups who are already at risk. Rapid assessments during the first months of the pandemic were critical to pinpoint the social, economic and political impacts of the crisis, and discover ways to mitigate them with sustainable, resilient and rights-based solutions forged through both the public and private sector.
World employment and social outlook: trends 2023
Institution: International Labour Organisation
Published: January 2023

This year’s World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends provides a comprehensive assessment of current decent work deficits and how these have been exacerbated by multiple, overlapping crises in recent years. It analyses global patterns, regional differences and outcomes across groups of workers. The report provides labour market projections for 2023 and 2024 and presents trends in labour productivity growth, analysing the factors contributing to its decline.

The impact of COVID-19 on education in Latin America: long-run implications for poverty and inequality

AUTHOR(S)
Jessica Bracco; Matías Ciaschi; Leonardo Gasparini (et al.)

Institution: The World Bank
Published: January 2023
The shock of the COVID-19 pandemic affected the human capital formation of children and youths. As a consequence of this disruption, the pandemic is likely to imply permanent lower levels of human capital. This paper provides new evidence on the impact of COVID-19 and school closures on education in Latin America by exploiting harmonized microdata from a large set of national household surveys carried out in 2020, during the pandemic. In addition, the paper uses microsimulations to assess the potential effect of changes in human capital due to the COVID-19 crisis on future income distributions. The findings show that the pandemic is likely to have significant long-run consequences in terms of incomes and poverty if strong compensatory measures are not taken soon.
Prevalence and severity of food insecurity before and during the COVID-19 pandemic among adults and youth in Australia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States

AUTHOR(S)
Alexandra Pepetone; Edward A. Frongillo; Kevin W. Dodd (et al.)

Published: January 2023   Journal: The Journal of Nutrition

Disruptions from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic potentially exacerbated food insecurity among adults and youth. The objective was to examine changes in the prevalence and severity of food insecurity among adults and youth from before (2019) to during (2020) the pandemic in multiple countries. Repeated cross-sectional data were collected among adults aged 18–100 y (n = 63,278) in 5 countries in November to December in 2018–2020 and among youth aged 10–17 y (n = 23,107) in 6 countries in November to December in 2019 and 2020. Food insecurity in the past year was captured using the Household Food Security Survey Module and the Child Food Insecurity Experiences Scale. Changes in the prevalence and severity of food insecurity were examined using logistic and generalized logit regression models, respectively. Models included age, gender, racial-ethnic identity, and other sociodemographic characteristics associated with food insecurity to adjust for possible sample differences across waves. Models were weighted to reflect each country’s population.

Racial healing during the COVID-19 and anti-Asian pandemics through critical consciousness informed antiracist parenting practices (CCIARP)

AUTHOR(S)
Yuying Tsong; Sapna B. Chopra; Hsiu-Lan Cheng

Published: January 2023   Journal: Asian American Journal of Psychology
Pervasive anti-Asian racism and xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic pose risks to Asian Americans’ mental health and wellness. Parents and caregivers play a vital role in children’s identity development and beliefs about race and racism. This article offers an analysis of anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on Asian American (AA) adults’ and children’s wellness. In addition, based on reviews and analyses of the literature, it proposes a framework of critical consciousness informed antiracist parenting (CCIARP) for AA parents, practitioners, and educators who work with them to understand and heal from existing and continuing racial trauma as well as strategies and tools to enact social change toward a more just future. CCIARP recommendations include (a) cultivating antiracist awareness, (b) building skills and engaging in activism, and (c) fostering an antiracist parent–child relationship. Limitations and future research needed to apply this framework are included in the discussions.
Gender roles, parenthood, and the ethics of care in pandemic media narratives pre- and post-Covid-19

AUTHOR(S)
Raffaella Baccolini; Chiara Xausa

Published: January 2023   Journal: European Journal of English Studies
Crises have always brought along transformations in gender identities, roles, and relations: while much has changed in Western culture regarding the role of women and notions of masculinity are also challenged, efforts to control female roles, bodies, and sexualities persist. For example, Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream has described the post-9/11 age as an era of reconstituted “traditional” manhood, redomesticated femininity and nuclear family “togetherness.” The question that lies at the basis of this paper is whether – and if so, how –science fiction cinema continues to respond to moments of crisis and vulnerability through the old myth of protective manhood and feminine weakness. By identifying two cases of insecurity – climate change and the coronavirus pandemic – this study analyses a recent film (Bird Box, 2018) and two TV series on pandemic outbreaks from the US (Sweet Tooth, 2021) and Italy (Anna, 2021). All three works break new ground – though not devoid of limits – about family structures and parental care: while Bird Box proposes a reversal of gender roles, Anna elaborates on the notion of motherhood by presenting unconventional models of mothering; in Sweet Tooth, the ethics of care is extended to the relationship between humans, animals, and the endangered environment.
Family climate in pandemic times: adolescents and mothers

AUTHOR(S)
Thomas Eichhorn; Simone Schüller; Hannah Sinja Steinberg (et al.)

Published: January 2023   Journal: Social Inclusion
This article examines changes in family climate during the first Covid‐19‐related lockdown in Germany. It compares the perspectives of mothers and adolescents to explore whether the factors of perceived changes in family climate are systematically and significantly different between these groups. It measures family climate as positive emotional climate, a sub‐dimension of the family environment scale, to capture a feeling of cohesion and emotional openness within the family. Based on family system theory and the family stress model, it expects an overall deterioration in family climate due to increased environmental adaptation in the pandemic. Furthermore, it expects family climate to deteriorate less when families have economic and social resources available. On the other hand, it assumes that being employed and/or primarily responsible for family care relates to a stronger decline in the family climate. This study employs longitudinal survey data (AID:A) from around 300 German families with children aged nine to 17 and applys individual fixed effects models to investigate changes in family climate from 2019 to 2020.
Who is doing the chores and childcare in dual-earner couples during the COVID-19 era of working from home?

AUTHOR(S)
Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia; Victoria Vernon

Published: January 2023   Journal: Review of Economics of the Household
In 2020–21, parents’ work-from-home days increased three-and-a-half-fold following the initial COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns compared to 2015–19. At the same time, many schools offered virtual classrooms and daycares closed, increasing the demand for household-provided childcare. Using weekday workday time diaries from American Time Use Survey and looking at parents in dual-earner couples, this study examines parents’ time allocated to paid work, chores, and childcare in the COVID-19 era by the couple’s joint work location arrangements. It determines the work location of the respondent directly from their diary and predicts the partner’s work-from-home status.
Inequalities in children's mental health care: analysis of routinely collected data on prescribing and referrals to secondary care

AUTHOR(S)
William P. Ball; Corri Black; Sharon Gordon (et al.)

Published: January 2023   Journal: BMC Psychiatry

One in eight children in the United Kingdom are estimated to have a mental health condition, and many do not receive support or treatment. The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted mental health and disrupted the delivery of care. Prevalence of poor mental health is not evenly distributed across age groups, by sex or socioeconomic groups. Equity in access to mental health care is a policy priority but detailed socio-demographic trends are relatively under-researched. This study analysed records for all mental health prescriptions and referrals to specialist mental health outpatient care between the years of 2015 and 2021 for children aged 2 to 17 years in a single NHS Scotland health board region. It analysed trends in prescribing, referrals, and acceptance to out-patient treatment over time, and measured differences in treatment and service use rates by age, sex, and area deprivation.

Re-imagining early childhood education and school readiness for children and families of color in the time of COVID-19 and beyond

AUTHOR(S)
Bonnie D. Kerker; Natalia M. Rojas; Spring Dawson-McClure (et al.)

Published: January 2023   Journal: American Journal of Health Promotion
High quality and culturally responsive early childhood education and care (ECEC) for young children before kindergarten is seen as a way to ensure that all children enter school ready to learn. ECEC is even more crucial in the context of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and the disproportionate burden of trauma and stress borne by families of color in disinvested neighborhoods. Remote learning and repeated disruptions to in-person instruction as protocols shifted during waves of the pandemic placed an extra strain on families, and may have increased educational disparities in the U.S. Taken together, these challenges have implications for children’s school readiness due to their impact on opportunities for learning at home and in the classroom. This paper explores how ECEC programs can be strengthened to better meet children’s needs, and ways in which future research can shed light on these important issues.
Screen-viewing behaviours of children before and after the 2020-21 COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK: a mixed methods study

AUTHOR(S)
Ruth Salway; Robert Walker; Kate Sansum (et al.)

Published: January 2023   Journal: BMC Public Health

Restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic have led to increased screen-viewing among children, especially during strict periods of lockdown. However, the extent to which screen-viewing patterns in UK school children have changed post lockdowns is unclear. The aim of this paper is to examine how screen-viewing changed in 10–11-year-old children over the 2020–21 COVID-19 pandemic, how this compares to before the pandemic, and the influences on screen-viewing behaviour. This is a mixed methods study with 10–11-year-olds from 50 schools in the Greater Bristol area, UK. Cross-sectional questionnaire data on minutes of weekday and weekend television (TV) viewing and total leisure screen-viewing were collected pre-COVID-19 in 2017–18 (N = 1,296) and again post-lockdowns in 2021 (N = 393). Data were modelled using Poisson mixed models, adjusted for age, gender, household education and seasonality, with interactions by gender and household education. Qualitative data were drawn from six focus groups (47 children) and 21 one-to-one parent interviews that explored screen-viewing behaviour during the pandemic and analysed using the framework method.

Investigating how the interaction between individual and circumstantial determinants influence the emergence of digital poverty: a post-pandemic survey among families with children in England

AUTHOR(S)
Maria Laura Ruiu; Massimo Ragnedda; Felice Addeo (et al.)

Published: January 2023   Journal: Information, Communication & Society
This paper explores Digital Poverty (DP) in England by adopting the DP Alliance’s theoretical framework that includes both Individual Determinants (individual capability and motivation) and Circumstantial Determinants (conditions of action). Such a framework is interpreted as an expression of Strong Structuration Theory (SST), by situating the connection between social structure and human agency in an intertwined relationship. This study focuses on new potential vulnerabilities that are connected to DP in England by drawing on a survey conducted on a randomised stratified sample (n = 1988) of parents aged between 20–55 with children at school.
Inclusive and resilient societies: equality, sustainability and efficiency
Institution: UNESCO
Published: December 2022

Inclusive and Resilient Societies explores the evolution of inequalities of different types and assesses their interaction with the Covid crisis across people, firms, and places. It shows how the impact of the pandemic varied widely, depending on whether and where people work, their gender, age, education, income levels, and the place they live in, and highlights how economic inequalities have expanded and left our societies with deep social scars.

Family resilience during the COVID-19 onset: A daily-diary inquiry into parental employment status, parent–adolescent relationships, and well-being

AUTHOR(S)
Ming-Te Wang; Juan Del Toro; Daphne A. Henry (et al.)

Published: December 2022   Journal: Development and Psychopathology
COVID-19 changed the landscape of employment and financial security in the USA, contributing to multi-systemic disruptions in family life. Using dyadic, daily-diary parent–adolescent data from a nationwide American sample (18,415 daily assessments; 29 days: 4/8/2020–4/21/2020 and 5/18/2020–6/1/2020; N = 635 parent–adolescent dyads), this intensive longitudinal study investigated how COVID-19-related job loss and working-from-home (WFH) arrangements influenced parents’ and children’s daily affect indirectly through family functioning (i.e., parent–adolescent conflict, inter-adult conflict, and parental warmth) and whether these links varied by family socioeconomic status (SES). Parental employment status was linked to these family relational dynamics, which were then connected to parents’ and adolescents’ daily affect.
Parents' work arrangements and gendered time use during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Thomas Lyttelton; Emma Zang; Kelly Musick

Published: December 2022   Journal: Journal of Marriage and Family

This study uses time diaries to examine how parents' work arrangements shaped their time use at home and work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic transformed home and work life for parents, disrupting employment and childcare. The shift to work from home offered more flexibility to manage increased care burdens, but the lack of separation between work and family also likely contributed to more challenging work environments, especially among mothers. This study relies on the 2017–2020 American Time Use Survey and matching to estimate changes in time use among parents working from home and on site in the pandemic relative to comparable parents prior to the pandemic.

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UNICEF Innocenti's Children and COVID-19 Library is a database collecting research from around the world on COVID-19 and its impacts on children and adolescents.

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COVID-19 & Children: Rapid Research Response

UNICEF Innocenti is mobilizing a rapid research response in line with UNICEF’s global response to the COVID-19 crisis. The initiatives we’ve begun will provide the broad range of evidence needed to inform our work to scale up rapid assessment, develop urgent mitigating strategies in programming and advocacy, and preparation of interventions to respond to the medium and longer-term consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. The research projects cover a rapid review of evidence, education analysis, and social and economic policies.