The Covid-19 crisis and children’s well-being

The Interdisciplinary Child Well-Being Network (ICWBN), co-led by CPC member Dr Júlia Mikolai and her collaborator Dr Yekaterina Chzhen from Trinity College Dublin, held an online workshop in September 2021 to discuss the impact of Covid-19 on young people’s well-being.

Children and young people’s health may have been less directly affected by Covid-19, but the indirect consequences of the pandemic are unprecedented, wide-ranging, and long-lasting. School closures, online learning, reduced time with friends, peers and teachers together with delayed access to healthcare have had a dramatic effect on children and their families with immediate, medium, and longterm implications. These must be completely understood if society is to prevent further long-term harm to them now and in the future.

The Network’s first workshop brought together academic and non-academic experts working on children’s economic well-being, education, and mental health outcomes in the UK and Ireland. Key findings from the event are:

– Families need better support and a greater say on what will help them thrive.

– Covid-19 exposed weaknesses in the system and made the already difficult lives of vulnerable people harder.

– Children from disadvantaged backgrounds and with Special Educational Needs (SEN) have been hit hardest, but children from all backgrounds need support.

Dr Mikolai comments:

The pandemic created new problems and challenges especially for less advantaged families already hard hit by austerity, and for children with special needs or learning difficulties. It exposed weaknesses and inadequacies in government support systems which failed to acknowledge and incorporate the experiences of those in need of help. It exacerbated pre-existing inequalities in access to the resources that can help a child do better in school and revealed the depth and extent of deprivation in certain areas. These effects are likely to have a long-lasting impact on their lives.

The Interdisciplinary Child Well-Being Network (ICWBN) was created to study the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on children in Ireland and the United Kingdom. The project aims to bring together academics and practitioners from the four nations of the UK and the Republic of Ireland to establish a network to study the economic and social impacts of the pandemic on children, and the associated policy responses, in the two countries and beyond. The ICWBN pools theories, evidence and methodological approaches from across the social sciences to study the medium- and longer-term consequences of the pandemic for children’s living standards as well as their outcomes in health, cognitive- and socio-behavioural development, educational attainment and achievement, and subjective well-being.

The ICWBN project is funded by the UK Research and InnovationEconomic and Social Research Council and the Irish Research Council under the ‘ESRC-IRC UK/ Ireland Networking Grants’.

Further reading

Covid-19 and children’s wellbeing (CPC Policy Briefing 67)

Generation pandemic (ICWBN podcast coming soon)