The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on child and adolescent development around the world

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Sixteen months later, by mid-July 2021, the virus had profoundly affected the families and networks of 188 million people who contracted COVID-19 and the 4.05 million who succumbed to it (WHO, 2021). COVID-19 has severely affected the way we study, work, and our physical movements. In terms of health and economics, it has already widened and expected to further expand, pre-existing inequalities between disadvantaged and more advantaged populations within many countries, and has highlighted the stark disparities among high-, middle-, and low-income countries. In short, this globally changing unprecedented crisis has affected all humankind and its effects are expected to continue for some time into the future. This special section of Child Development focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on child development around the world. At the time of writing, home confinement measures and school closures were still in effect in many countries; and access to the COVID-19 vaccine, as well as attitudes toward and rates of vaccination, varied widely both within and across countries (UNESCO, 2021); and variants of the virus were causing new surges in infection rates in many locations. In the span of recorded history, there have been only a handful of global pandemics, and in each case these events had significant impacts on humanity. In the mid-1300s, the Black Death spread across Europe, parts of North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, killing at least a third of the European population and millions more elsewhere. More than a century ago, the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 decreased the human population by one-third with 500 million infections and 50 million deaths being recorded within a 2-year period. During both of these episodes, a limited amount was known about the causal mechanisms of these illnesses, leading to inconsistent and often ineffective strategies for preventing transmission. Fast-forward 100 years to a far more globally interconnected and technologically advanced world. Modern medicine not only has the capacity to precisely identify biological pathogens, but also to employ a range of strategies to prevent and cure illnesses associated with these pathogens. This made it possible when COVID-19 began to spread around the world for the virus to be quickly isolated and genetically sequenced, and for a range of pharmaceutical interventions to be rapidly developed and deployed in order to contain the effects of the virus and to manage the symptoms of those who have contracted it. Genomic sequencing has allowed differentiation among alpha, beta, gamma, and delta variants, and for the ongoing development of effective treatments for these variants. Impressively, more than 3.4 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered by July 2021 (WHO, 2021). In addition to vaccinations, stringent scientifically informed, non-pharmaceutical public health measures (mask wearing; contact tracing; lockdowns; school closures) have been introduced to decrease transmission and mitigate the physiological impact of the virus (ventilators). These measures have further reduced infection and mortality rates from COVID-19 in many areas. It is important to note that both biomedical and public health activities have been highly politicized in some key countries. In the United States, Brazil and to some extent India, politically motivated skepticism of science led to delays in mobilizing the resources necessary to combat the virus, and also produced significant polarization around willingness to comply with public health measures (including vaccinations). This has undoubtedly prolonged the pandemic and led to extensive unnecessary illness and death. Just as the fields of medicine and public health were much less well developed during the last global pandemic a century ago, psychology and the subfield of child development were in their infancy. As such, there are no empirical data, to our knowledge, on the impact of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic on children, youth, and families. Circumstances are quite different now. One of the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic is the extent to which child development researchers rose to the challenge of collecting data during these uncertain times on how children, adolescents, and their families were being affected. Notably, many developmental scientists, who were already collecting prospective longitudinal data before the pandemic, were determined to have their research continue as the pandemic took hold and developed innovative strategies to allow studies to continue remotely. These data are providing an invaluable record of a global “experiment of nature” with pre-pandemic, trans-pandemic, and ultimately post-pandemic evidence of its impact on children and families. In addition, numerous new studies and surveys have been initiated. Indeed, the response of the field has been of such magnitude that a google scholar search with the terms “COVID-19,” “children,” “adolescents,” and “youth” yielded thousands of results. Consequently, there is beginning to emerge an extensive scientific literature on the impact of COVID-19 on child development. This Special Section contains only a small sample of the groundbreaking research that has been conducted on the effects of the pandemic on child and adolescent development across the world. When the call for papers for the Special Section was posted on July 20, 2020, the response from the research community was immense—we received a total of 215 letters of intent by the submission deadline (the magnitude of this response is actually unprecedented in the history of Child Development, making the selection of proposed manuscripts to invite for submission quite challenging). We wished to include manuscripts based on original, empirical studies of the impact of the pandemic on children, youth, and families, and on efforts to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on children. We ultimately invited 30 corresponding authors to submit a full manuscript by December 31, 2020. Among these, and after careful peer review, nine were eventually selected for inclusion in this Special Section. These selected submissions reflect our editorial judgment of the unique contribution of each of the articles and showcase rigorous research on the impact of COVID-19 on children and their families across the globe. Several important notes are necessary to contextualize the manuscript selection process. First, the field of child development research has been scrutinized for over-representing participants from western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries (Henrich et al., 2010). Indeed, samples from WEIRD countries, wherein a minority of the world's population live, are prominent in the developmental psychology literature (Nielsen et al., 2017). As editors of this Special Section, we endeavored to select articles that represented a wide range of non-WEIRD contexts and methodologies, as well as research emanating from more conventional sources. Second, we are aware that COVID-19 has disproportionately affected children from certain subgroups. Children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, those historically subjected to structural inequalities based on race/ethnicity, those with additional health and/or special needs, those with limited access to digital resources, those from families in which there are mental health and addiction issues, and those from low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) have been the most impacted. In this introduction, we endeavor to provide a global perspective on the above-mentioned issues. Moreover, given the centrality of schools on child and family well-being and considering school suspension across the world, we also invited a comment on the Right to Education (Fredman, 2021). Third, there are clearly commonalities and distinctions in the impact of the COVID-19 in different parts of the world. All children, regardless of where they lived experienced social restrictions and/or isolation because of government restrictions. COVID-19 also affected fertility and the number of siblings a child may have in the future. History tells us that pandemics lead to a decrease in fertility in the short term and increases after some time. However, we are not yet in a position to determine the impact of COVID-19 on fertility rates. On the one hand, it is assumed that fertility rates will go down in high-income countries where prospective mothers are older and assisted reproductive technologies were suspended. On the other hand, the closure of family planning clinics and no access to contraception may lead to an increase in unwanted pregnancies (Aassve et al., 2020) and lack of access to abortions in LMIC. From a systems science perspective, global pandemics represent a “shock to the system,” affecting every aspect of society. Relatedly, macrosystem changes during the pandemic, such as lockdowns/curfews/stay at home orders, transactionally affect family, school, and work life. As such, in considering the impact of COVID-19 on child development, we sought manuscripts that would allow us to (i) differentiate between the impact of COVID-19 per se and the impact of the measures enforced to decrease virus transmission; (ii) note the varying impact of the disease on high- and low-resource contexts; (iii) be aware of the deleterious consequence of unpredictability on human functioning; and (iv) recognize the role of protective factors in alleviating some of the potentially adverse impacts of COVID-19 on children and families. We are still in a state of flux concerning information about COVID-19 and there will be much ongoing learning about the effects of COVID-19 and its variants. We are yet unsure about numerous issues, including how long the virus remains in the body, the exact nature of transmission, reasons for variations in reactions to contracting the virus, vaccine availability, and efficacy. We do know that the influence of population density on COVID-19 transmission varies across country contexts (Bhadra et al., 2021). We also know that countries have experienced ebbs and flows in the number of active cases, as shown in Figure 1. This means that countries that had surges in infection rates at different times had access to different amounts of scientific information about the virus when the surges occurred. 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