Human development in times of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic represented a highly dynamic cause of multisystem disturbances that evoked complex and largely differing responses of countries, communities, neighbourhoods, families, schools, and individuals. With these multisystem complexities in mind, it is nearly impossible to fully understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on human development. Nevertheless, when applying appropriate research designs, it is possible to gain some major insights on how human development unfolded during this global crisis. The main goal of this special section was to collect some of the strongest studies that have been conducted to better understand various aspects of human functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic, with an emphasis on youth and their caregivers. The studies that were chosen for this special section comprise children, adolescents, emerging adults, and mothers, and they aimed to better understand changes in life satisfaction, mental health, academic motivation, food intake, and parenting. Taken together, these studies provide highly informative spotlights on human development in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they call for future analyses to further elucidate unexpected findings that might have occurred more often than we have initially thought.

Excess suicides in Brazil during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic: Gender, regional and age group inequalities

“…It is very likely that women have suffered disproportionately during the pandemic, owing to the double burden of job responsibilities and domestic duties, which encompass tending to their own and their children's health, home schooling their children, stress from food insecurity, the lethal and non-lethal consequences of COVID-19 or even the premature death of a spouse or close relative, especially if this person was an important source of household income (Camarano, 2020;King et al, 2023;Milner et al, 2014;Racine et al, 2021;Santos et al, 2022;Strohmeier & Branje, 2023). One last explanatory hypothesis would be the increase in domestic violence or abuse against women prior to and during pandemic restrictions, since these kinds of victimizations can be exacerbated during crises like outbreaks and natural disasters (Campbell et al, 2023;Kim & Royle, 2023;Kitulwatte et al, 2023;Morgan et al, 2022;Nesset et al, 2021), further increasing women's vulnerability to suicide (MacIsaac et al, 2017).…”