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"When will it be over?" U.S. children's questions and parents' responses about the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT: Parent-child conversations are important for children's cognitive development, children's ability to cope with stressful events, and can shape children's beliefs about the causes of illness. In the context of a global pandemic, families have faced a multitude of challenges, including changes to their routines, that they need to convey to their children. Thus, parent-child conversations about the coronavirus pandemic might convey information about the causes of illness, but also about how and why it is necessary for children to modify their behaviors to comply with new social norms and medical guidance. The main goal of this study was to examine the questions children ask about the COVID-19 pandemic and how parents answer them. This survey included responses from a national sample of 349 predominantly white parents of children between the ages of 3 and 12 recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk in United States. Parents reported that although children asked about COVID-19 and its causes (17.3%), children asked primarily about lifestyle changes that occurred as a result of the pandemic (24.0%) and safety (18.4%). Parents reported answering these questions by emphasizing that the purpose of different preventative measures was to protect the child (11.8%) or the family (42.7%) and providing reassurance (13.3%). Many parents discussed how it was their social responsibility to slow the spread of the virus (38.4%). Parents of younger children tended to shield them from information about COVID-19 (p = .038), while parents with more knowledge were more likely to provide explanations (p < .001). Our analysis shows that families not only discuss information about the virus but also information about changes to their lifestyle, preventative measures, and social norms.

SUBMITTER: Menendez D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8389399 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundCOVID-19 has drastically changed the everyday lives of children, including limiting interactions with peers, loss of regularly organized activities, and closure of schools and recreational facilities. While COVID-19 protocols are in place to reduce viral transmission, they have affected children's access to physical activity opportunities. The purpose of this study was to understand how COVID-19 has affected children's engagement in physical activity and to identify strategies that can support children's return to physical activity programming in public places.MethodsParents of past participants in the Grade 5 ACT-i-Pass Program in London, Ontario, Canada were invited to participate in a semi-structured interview online (in November and December 2020) via Microsoft Teams. The script was comprised of questions about their child's physical activity levels (before, current, and anticipated following COVID-19), lifestyle changes due to COVID-19, and what service providers can do to assist children's return to public programming. Interviews were transcribed in Microsoft Teams, reviewed by a member of the research team, and analyzed in NVivo 12 using thematic analysis.ResultsTwenty-seven parents participated in an interview. Four themes and two subthemes were identified during analysis: (1) modifications to everyday life (a. activity options available and b. altered social environment), (2) safety in public spaces, (3) accessibility of activities, and (4) utilizing outdoor spaces.ConclusionsCOVID-19 protocols have decreased children's physical activity levels due to the loss of their regular activities, recreational spaces, and peer support. Implementing facility and activity-specific health protocols, providing outdoor activity options, and offering a variety of activity types, times, and locations are three strategies recommended by parents to help facilitate their children's return to public recreational places. Due to the negative consequences of physical inactivity on children's health and well-being, service providers need to implement programming and safety protocols that support children's engagement in physical activity throughout the remainder of, and the years following, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Project description:Despite growing concerns that children (8-13 years old) tend to avoid the news, the reasons why have received little research attention. Therefore, the current study aims to develop and test a model conceptualizing the relations between children's news consumption, news avoidance, emotional responses (negative emotions and anxiety-related behaviors), and parent and child mitigation strategies. The model was tested using data collected during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The current, preregistered, survey study was part of a longitudinal project and used data from the second wave. Data were collected in November/December 2020 among 510 children (M age = 10.40; 53.72% girls). Findings showed that children who consumed more news during the pandemic avoided pandemic news less often. Children who experienced more anxiety-related behaviors regarding pandemic news avoided pandemic news more often. The relation between news consumption and emotional responses was stronger for children who experienced restrictive parental mediation more often, indicating that this was not an effective parental mediation strategy for tempering their emotional responses. Children with higher levels of emotional responses used reactive coping strategies more often. However, this did not seem to be an effective strategy against pandemic news avoidance because none of the strategies had a negative relation with pandemic news avoidance. Distancing was even positively related to pandemic news avoidance. Although the current study was not able to fully unravel how news avoidance-related constructs relate to one another, we were able to get some important insights guiding future research. Specifically, it is of crucial importance to unravel the mechanisms that increase the chance of children's news avoidance and those that mitigate it, to build interventions to counteract news avoidance and to protect children from the negative emotional consequences by news consumption.

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"When will it be over?" U.S. children's questions and parents' responses about the COVID-19 pandemic.

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