How did parents’ experiences in the labour market shape children’s social and emotional development during the pandemic?

Abstract

contributed immeasurably to the initial analysis for this report. The authors are also grateful to the team at the Department for Education who carried out the linkage between our survey data and the National Pupil Database (DSAP approval DS00539), and to the team at the ONS Secure Research Service who checked the outputs against statistical disclosure rules. Finally, the authors wish to thank all of the parents who gave up their time to complete the survey during the pandemic.How did parents' experiences in the labour market shape children's social and 2 emotional development during the pandemic? Executive summaryThe COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many aspects of children's lives, with impacts on their social and emotional development as well as their educational attainment. School closures increased social and emotional difficulties (Blanden et al., 2021); lack of contact with friends and extended family left some children without a trusted adult to turn to (Newlove-Delgado et al., 2021); and severe illness and death of loved ones increased (Slomski, 2021;Liang, Becker and Rice, 2022).In this report, we consider another channel through which the pandemic may have affected children's social and emotional development: the disruption to parents' experiences in the labour market created by lockdown restrictions.As in many other countries, national lockdowns and wider social distancing measures severely disrupted the UK's labour market, with many businesses shutting down. The government introduced a range of policies, such as the furlough scheme, to insure workers against the impacts of these closures. Even so, a shifting public health and policy landscape meant that many families had some financial losses during the first year of the pandemic, and/or faced high levels of uncertainty.Taken together, parents' labour market experiences during the pandemic could have affected both a household's resources and the quality and quantity of time parents and children spent together. Since systematic reviews of children's mental health during the pandemic consistently suggest that higher socio-economic status and better relationships with parents were protective factors (Ng and Ng, 2022;Theberath et al., 2022), analysing the role that parents' labour market experiences played in shaping children's outcomes is crucial for understanding how the pandemic affected children and their development. Key findings1. Overall, parents reported that their children's social and behavioural difficulties increased during the first year of the pandemic. Nearly half of parents reported that their child had more socio-emotional difficulties in February 2021 than a year earlier, while around one in six reported fewer challenges. Parents of girls and younger children, and those who were furloughed, were more likely to report worsening  The Institute for Fiscal Studies, August 2023How did parents' experiences in the labour market shape children's social and 4 emotional development during the pandemic?