COVID’s child crisis

While all of us understandably remain wary of the next COVID-19 variant around the corner, the time has come to consider our responsibility to the most vulnerable among us — children and youth — and begin the long, hard process of their recovery and the reconstruction of their world.

The full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health of children around the world will take decades to fully see and understand, but devastating near-term impacts are already coming into focus. A new report published by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences is based on data on youth wellbeing — health, mental health, educational and developmental processes in a variety of contexts including Africa, the Americas, the Asian subcontinent and Europe. The report, “The Covid Generation: Children and Youth in and after the Pandemic Responding to the World Crisis,” is staggering in its documentation of the breadth and depth of COVID-19’s impact.

Hundreds of millions of children around the globe have become infected with virus and hundreds of thousands have died. More than 5 million have lost a parent or close caretaker. Those in poor countries, or in affluent countries where they are a racial or ethnic minorities, are disproportionately impacted. The inequities are barbaric. For every white American child orphaned, 1.8 Hispanic American, 2.4 African American and 4.5 Native American children are mourning parents.

Youth also mourned the loss of other kin and kith, neighbors and friends. Youth around the world lost routines, rituals, access to schools, athletics, open play spaces, clubs and places of worship as the institutions of society shut down. Isolation rules, bans on social gatherings, social distancing orders further removed youth from the normative experiences essential for culturally appropriate psycho-social development. Millions of children around the world came to be cared by parents who lost their livelihoods. Parents and other caretakers, who were themselves in mourning and depressed became less available to meet the needs of children. As death stalked cities, suburbs and rural areas in a tsunami of suffering, the cumulative impact of such scale of loss will be felt for decades to come. 

Millions of children and youths are experiencing damage and dislocations likely to mark their developmental pathways for years to come. COVID-19 can be described as a long-lasting catastrophic shock removing youth from the proscribed pathways to reach and master culturally marked milestones — in the maturational, socio-emotional, cognitive and spiritual realms. Fundamentally, the pandemic has ruptured many of the normative social processes that structure and give predictability and meaning to daily life. The pandemic deprived millions of youths of learning opportunities, the joy of socializing with other youth, and supports from caretakers, teachers, mentors, faith workers and extended family members.

The disruptions created by the pandemic are cascading through society, and will for years to come. These include a lack of access to school, health care, vaccinations, nutrition, sports and various scaffolds needed for normatively appropriate maturational development. The disruptions have led to isolation, stress, sexual and physical violence, as well as multiplying mental health effects. According to UNICEF, “Across virtually every key measure of childhood, progress has gone backward in the 12 months since the pandemic was declared, leaving children confronting a devastating and distorted new normal.” 

Anxiety and depressive symptoms among youth doubled during the pandemic, and now 25 percent of all youth are experiencing depression, according to the U.S. Surgeon General. In early 2021, emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts were 50 percent higher among girls than during the same period in 2019.

The good news is that many children are remarkably resilient and adaptable to the most adverse of circumstances. Nonetheless, we cannot be complacent in expecting that healing and recalibrations depend on personal characteristics; rather, it is crucial we recognize that the solution lie in the rebuilding of the social world around them. Strengthening institutions such as schools, universities, foundations, philanthropists, youth-serving, community-based organizations, NGOs, clubs, voluntary associations and places of worship will be key. Moving forward we need to focus on:

• Prioritizing vaccines for all children and include those under 5 years old as soon as we have strong scientific evidence to support it.
• Train lay people to provide mental health services to help ease the crisis in access.
• Engage civil society and religious organizations to work with governments to identify children who are suffering from parental loss and other severe disruptions.
• Incorporate belonging and opportunity into education so that it becomes future-building.
• Ensure that well-meaning interventions do not exacerbate the stark inequities in access to early childhood care.

To get to the depth of what the pandemic has done to children, our response must be more than a series of practical measures. We must regard human beings not as absolutes but as “beings in relation,” in the words of Pope Francis, focused on “transcendent human dignity.” We can hope that will be the enduring lesson of the pandemic.

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco is a member of the executive committee of Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in the Vatican Gardens, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston and Wasserman dean emeritus of UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies. His forthcoming book, “Education: A Global Compact for a Time of Crisis,” will be published by Columbia University Press in May.