The isolation related to the COVID-19 pandemic is causing both physical and mental health concerns for children worldwide. When the pandemic is over, schools and kindergartens represent a crucial context that can play an important role in promoting young people's well-being. This paper presents a school re-entry program aimed at creating an arena where children can process emotions, rediscover interpersonal connections, and develop an awareness of effective coping strategies. For all kindergarten, primary and middle school students, suggestions for evaluating the effectiveness of the program based on its educational and psycho-social components are given. School is an ideal setting to deliver these activities to children as it represents return to their daily routine. Schools also provide equal access to resources and reach children belonging to at-risk socioeconomic categories and cultural minorities. Two printable activity packs are provided as additional materials for teachers who want to recreate or adapt the presented activities for their own contexts.

The study aimed to explore the differences in the role of specific personal and interpersonal risk factors in predicting fear of childbirth (FOC) and to examine whether FOC predicts postnatal maternal adaptation in nulliparous and parous women. A prospective correlational design with two time periods (pre- and postnatal) was carried out with 158 women, 85 nulliparous and 73 parous. Women at Week 32 of gestation completed a demographic questionnaire, the Wijma Delivery Expectancy Questionnaire (K.Wijma, B. Wijma, & M. Zar, 1998), the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (C.D. Spielberger, R.L. Gorsuch, & R.E. Lushene, 1970), the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (L.R. Derogatis, 1983), the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (G.B. Spanier, 1976), and the Reciprocal Attachment Questionnaire (M. West, A. Sheldon, & L. Reiffer, 1987). Three months after delivery, the women completed the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (J.L. Cox, J.M. Holden, & R. Sagovsky, 1987) and the Parenting Stress Index-Short Form (R. Abidin, 1986). Pearson's correlations and a series of multiple regressions were conducted. The results indicated that in the prenatal period, higher state anxiety, β = .35, p < .001, lower dyadic adjustment, β = -.26, p = .03, and higher insecurity in attachment relationships, β = .39, p < .001, predicted FOC in first-time mothers only. In the postnatal period, FOC predicted postnatal maternal risk for depression, β = .39, p = .02, and parenting stress, β = .42, p = .02, for nulliparous women only. The specific antecedents and consequences of FOC in nulliparous and parous women should be taken into consideration when developing specific interventions.

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The education of children with a medical condition represents a unique educational context. The key educational factors that can help these children continue their education despite the burdens associated with their illness were discussed and analysed by a pool of experts for an EU funded project. In this context, relationships, making sense and constructing knowledge, assuming roles in front of others, metacognition, individualities and inter-institutional communication emerged as the 6 Key Educational Factors (KEF) that are crucial for the education of this vulnerable population. The implications of the KEFs for home and hospital education are discussed, with a particular focus on practices that meet the relational and communicational needs of these children. Specific recommendations for the practice, policy, and research regarding these KEF within this unique educational context are presented.

We propose that children’s play and coping strategies are connected. However, this connection has often been overlooked in the literature. To prove our hypothesis, the principal developmental functions of play are reviewed and compared with the different stages of the coping process. Our results show that coping and play are essential elements in child development, and indicate the presence of several overlapping areas where play and coping intersect. In spite of this, their interrelationship has seldom been examined. We explore the possible reasons for this omission with reference to the different natures of play and coping constructs, and also to the definitive psychometric and cognitive characteristics of most common coping measurement instruments. We conclude by proposing that play should be considered an elective form of coping in most aspects of children’s lives. We also propose that methods to measure coping in children should be improved and a more analogical approach should be adopted toward play to enable accurate recognition of coping.

Searching for a target while avoiding distraction is a core function of selective attention involving both voluntary and reflexive mechanisms. Here, for the first time, we investigated the development of the interplay between voluntary and reflexive mechanisms of selective attention from childhood to early adulthood. We asked 6-, 10-, and 20-year-old participants to search for a target presented in one hemifield of a complex scene, preceded by a task-irrelevant auditory cue on either the target side (valid), the opposite side (invalid), or both sides (neutral). For each scene we computed the number of salient locations (NSL) and the target saliency (TgS). All age groups showed comparable orienting effects ("valid minus neutral" trials), indicating a similar capture of spatial attention by valid cues which was independent of age. However, only adults demonstrated a suppression of the reorienting effect ("invalid minus neutral" trials), indicating late developments in the reallocation of spatial attention toward a target following auditory distraction. The searching performance of the children (both 6- and 10-year-olds), but not of the adults, was predicted by the NSL, indicating an attraction of processing resources to salient but task-irrelevant locations in childhood; conversely, only adults showed greater performance with increased TgS in valid trials, indicating late development in the use of task-related saliency. These findings highlight qualitatively different mechanisms of selective attention operating at different ages, demonstrating important developmental changes in the interplay between voluntary and reflexive mechanisms of selective attention during visual search in complex scenes.

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The Covid19 pandemic raised concerns regarding millions of children’s mental health. For schools, the real challenge has been how to manage the situation in terms of education and development. The present investigation was carried out to evaluate a school re-entry program that supported teachers and students with activities aimed at processing emotions and lockdown experiences in their classrooms. Results show that the program was well perceived and was associated with a consequent reduction in children’s state anxiety and negative emotions. We conclude that a school re-entry program can play an important role in fostering resilience and development during a crisis.