The Pandemic’s Effect on Children Globally: A Brief Perspective

During the current pandemic, school-aged children around the world have faced unprecedented life stressors never experienced by recent generations. Schools, clubs, sports, and churches were suddenly closed across the nation and people of all ages had to adjust to a new way of living. Fear and uncertainty clouded the nation and the trajectory of the future was unknown. Yet, children and adolescents in developing countries who already live with chronic hardships may have experienced the 2020-2021 pandemic differently than those in developed countries. For instance, children in Haiti have faced natural disasters and extreme poverty throughout their lives including a recent earthquake in August of 2021; thus, the recent pandemic was another opportunity to demonstrate their ability to manage life difficulties. This paper introduces the difficulties that school-aged children dealt with globally in 2020-2021. The idea for this topic came about due to the authors’ involvement in service work in orphanages in Haiti and the realization that the pandemic affected children there very differently. These new stressors related to Covid-19 continue to put challenges on the daily life of all children. Around the world, these include limited or few social outlets, limited or no opportunities to attend school face to face, increased economic concerns in families, childcare issues for some parents who were required to work without their children being in school, and overall anxiety about the future. Thus, children’s mental health, access to education, and health concerns are addressed in light of the pandemic and in light of differing economic stations around the world.

Much has already been written on mental health and schoolaged children during the height of the 2020 pandemic. Global lockdown in most countries around the world was instituted to drastically stop the spread of the virus and this has not been experienced in modern history. The last extensive lockdown was in 1918 with the Spanish Flu which lasted over two years infecting 500 million people (one-third of the world’s population at the time). With severe job losses around the world affecting each member in a family, school closures, business as usual being shut down (restaurants, barbers, and the ability to conduct normal life), church closures, and the banning of sports, millions of people had to adjust to a new way of life. However, this was not the case in developing countries as the hardships already faced by the people there made this pandemic not as severe as other places around the world. For instance, in Haiti, due to the extreme poverty there, communities of people barely noticed the pandemic as their economic and health issues were already so extreme [1]. In China, 1210 respondents from 194 cities were surveyed about the psychological impact and psychiatric symptoms of this pandemic [2]. Females and students were significantly associated with a greater psychological impact of the outbreak and had higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. 75.2% were highly worried that a family member would get COVID. Anecdotes from children in Southern California provide evidence of social and emotional difficulties in all grades and genders due to community lockdowns [1].

Globally, roughly a third of the world’s schoolchildren, or nearly 600 million, were affected by pandemic-related school closures, according to UNICEF, the United Nations agency responsible for aid to children. During the most difficult part of the pandemic in 2020, approximately 463 million schoolchildren worldwide (by UNICEF estimates) lacked Internet, television or radio and were left with almost no access to education [3]. This would be most obvious in developing countries where technology is not a consistent part of life. “We are seeing very real disparities between those children able to access remote learning, and poor children, children in rural areas, adolescent girls and disabled children who just don’t have equal access,” said Robert Jenkins, UNICEF’s education chief [3]. In response to Covid-19, 107 countries closed schools nationally by March 18, 2020 [4]. This has been proven to be an overreaction as recent modelling studies showed that only 2-4% of deaths could possibly have been prevented by school closures alone without consideration of other measures such as social distancing. Other less disruptive social distancing interventions should be considered before school closures occur again.

The obvious concern related to health and the spread of Covid-19 is the amount of illness and deaths that occurred which continue to impact society. Many children lost parents or caretaking relatives. As the pandemic wore on and new variants were introduced into society, children have become more and more affected by transmitting Covid-19 themselves with deaths in children increasing. Covid-19 spread to every country and infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands [5]. In addition, the imposed shutdown and confinement of people in developed countries led to drastically increased screen time, extensive use of digital media, and an extreme rise in sedentary activity [1,6,7]. Many families did not get the level of exercise they were used to since children’s physical activities were stopped, and parents were not walking at work. For instance, at many school sites, children would need to walk upstairs to get to different classrooms, but with the requirement to stay home as much as possible, this extra exercise on top of after school activities and physical education classes did not exist [1]. Many of the typical activity patterns and sleep habits went through a noticeable transformation during this lockdown phase. It was observed that prolonged restriction on inherent practices brought about by this period of confinement may have deterred the health well-being of people [2]. Effects on different activity levels may not have been true in developing countries as their lives remained much the same; yet, infection levels among children were similar as the variants increasingly infected younger and younger people around the world. Those in developing countries did not have access to healthcare and lifesaving treatment if infected with Covid-19.

Children around the world were affected differently during the 2020-2021 pandemic. Those in developed countries who saw their lives shut down were unable to attend school face to face or participate in their after-school activities the same way as usual. This led to mental health issues such as increased depression due to social isolation. Yet, children in developing countries who had been attending school no longer had access at all due to no virtual learning opportunities. Thus, their education levels fell behind by one year and possibly even two. This put children in poorer parts of the world at an increasing disadvantage for upward mobility and also affected their mental health. Children in all countries have been affected by the new variants that have increasingly infected younger people. Disparities in healthcare make this especially a concern for those in poorer nations. The social-emotional, educational, and health effects of Covid-19 on children will long reverberate throughout the world until the pandemic ends. Upcoming research should focus on children’s perspectives on how the pandemic has affected them in these different aspects of life.

None.

No Conflict of interest.

1. Pierson BE (2020) Unpublished interviews of children in Port au Prince, Haiti, and Orange County, California.
2. Wang C, Pan R, Wan X, Tan Y, Xu L, et al. (2020) Immediate psychological responses and associated factors during the initial stage of the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic among the general population in China. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17(5): 1729.
3. Chauvin LO, Faiola A (2020) Remote learning in Peru and around world is leaving poor children behind. The Washington Post.
4. Viner RM, Russell SJ, Croker H, Packer M, Ward J, et al. (2020) School closure and management practices during coronavirus outbreaks including COVID-19: A rapid systematic review.  The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health 4(5): 397-404.
5. John Hopkins University (2020) COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
6. Dutta K, Mukherjee R, Sen D, Subhashis S (2020) Effect of COVID-19 lockdown on sleep behavior and screen exposure time: An observational study among Indian school children.
7. Chen S, Bonanno GA (2020) Psychological adjustment during the global outbreak of COVID-19: A resilience perspective.  Psychological Trauma:  Theory Research Practice and Policy 12(S1): S51-S54.