United Kingdom: A new study has found that half of all children suffered a setback to their emotional and social development during the initial year of the pandemic. Younger siblings were more likely to have been negatively affected compared to their older brothers and sisters.
According to the research conducted in the United Kingdom, children from all economic backgrounds in England were affected, though those aged four to seven were significantly more likely to have suffered a deterioration in their skills than 12- to 15-year-olds.
The report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) revealed that children whose parents’ employment situation changed due to the pandemic, such as being furloughed, were significantly more prone to worsening social and emotional abilities.
“In contrast, the social and emotional development of just one in six children improved over the same period,” the research by the IFS and UCL Institute of Education, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, remarked.
The researchers surveyed 6,095 parents living in England with children ages four to 16. Parents answered 13 questions about their child’s behaviour, including how often they appeared worried, how easily they lost confidence, and how often they had tantrums in February 2021 and, retrospectively, a year earlier.
Nearly half of parents (47 percent) reported that their child had more socio-emotional difficulties in 2021 than in 2020. Children aged four to seven were 10 percentage points more likely to have seen their social and emotional development worsen than 12- to 15-year-olds (52 percent compared with 42 percent).
Parents of girls and those who were furloughed were also more likely to report a worsening in their child’s socio-emotional skills than children whose parents had stable employment throughout the pandemic.
Mr. Andrew McKendrick, a research economist at IFS and one of the authors of the report, commented that “during the COVID-19 pandemic, children from all backgrounds saw their social and emotional skills worsen considerably.
“Children lived through many changes during these years: school closures, lack of contact with friends and family, and potentially devastating severe illness or death among loved ones. Our research shows that another important driver of children’s declining skills was the economic disruptions experienced by their parents, whether or not those disruptions led to a large income loss,” Mr. McKendrick noted.
“With the cost of living crisis currently hitting many families’ budgets, our findings are a reminder that economic uncertainty can have multi-generational impacts,” the author added.
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