Responsive caregiving, opportunities for early learning, and children’s safety and security during COVID-19: A rapid review

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been drastic changes in family life and programs and services that promote and protect early childhood development. Global stakeholders have raised concerns that the pandemic is putting enormous strain on parents and other caregivers, compromising capabilities and enabling environments for nurturing care of young children and therefore likely impacting children's development. This rapid review takes stock of emerging research on nurturing care for young children during the COVID-19 crisis. Two databases were searched in addition to an extensive search for grey literature, drawing on 112 scholarly and scientific studies from more than 30 countries that have examined components of nurturing care during the pandemic, namely: responsive caregiving, early learning and play, and children's safety and security. There are some reports of unexpected positive benefits of the pandemic on families, including increased father involvement in caregiving. But more commonly, the studies' findings reveal numerous issues of concern, including parental and caregiver mental health difficulties and less responsive parent and child relationships, increased screen time among children, limited opportunities for outdoor play, and fractured systems for responding to potential child neglect and maltreatment. Evidence suggests limited access and challenges in the provision of remote learning for the youngest learners, such as those in early childhood education. The findings can inform global stakeholders, who have advocated for increased support and funding to ensure young children and other caregivers are supported and protected during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is an urgent need for action-oriented implementation studies and those that go beyond identifying trends and begin to pinpoint "what works" to effectively promote and protect nurturing care during emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 and Education Disruption in Ontario: Emerging Evidence on Impacts

“…31 Other concerns include extensive screen time and a lack of outdoor play. 32 A Canadian study of 2,100 youth-parent pairs found that students reported changed behaviours associated with school closures. 33 Most youth were found to be spending less time on homework, sleeping more than before, and almost half find school less interesting than before COVID-19.…”

What Happened to the Prevention of Child Maltreatment During COVID-19? A Yearlong into the Pandemic Reflection

“…Moreover, researchers have been stressing that this decrease should not be attributed to an increase in the safety of children but rather due to the adverse impact of the lockdown on the system's ability to see and protect children (e.g., Baron et al, 2020;Katz & Cohen, 2020). In addition, there is growing evidence that during COVID-19, various CM risk factors significantly increased (Conrad-Hiebner & Byram, 2020;Proulx et al, 2021;Rodriguez et al, 2020;Wu & Xu, 2020), such as parental job loss (Lawson et al, 2020), parental social isolation (Lee et al, 2021), and mental health issues (Russell et al, 2020). Adding to this, parental stress was found to be a major CM risk factor that increased during COVID-19 and an increase in selfreported child abuse was found for parents experiencing heightened stressors (Lawson et al, 2020).…”

Are Social and Ethnic Reading Inequalities Increasing During School Closures?—The Mediating Role of Parental Involvement in Distance Learning

“…Put simply, it makes a difference if a parent tends to be controlling due to specific values or stress exposure and thus, gets involved in homework, in a controlling way, some days a week for up to an hour, or if she/he gets involved, in a controlling way, 5 days a week for several hours. Moreover, a recent research review indicates that lockdowns lead to more parental stress and stress outcomes (e.g., depression, burnout), especially in low SES families and in parents of younger children, which was also accompanied by harsher and less warm parenting (Proulx et al, 2021). Thus, lockdowns might especially increase stress exposure of low SES parents, which in turn affects their involvement in distance learning.…”