Most Children Rebounded After COVID-19 Disruptions, Study Finds
Long-term research finds most children recovered from the effects of the pandemic, with lasting challenges concentrated among those already facing hardships.
Six years after COVID-19 disrupted childhood around the world, new research following the same children from before and after the pandemic found that the damage was far less widespread than early warnings predicted. The University of Texas at Austin helped organize a collection of 17 long-term studies from six countries, published together in the journal Child Development, that show most children’s health, learning, social development and well-being recovered substantially over time.
Early studies of COVID-19, based on short-term data collected during the pandemic itself, warned of widespread and lasting harm to child development. This new research, which tracked children over a longer period, tells a different story: Pandemic impacts were real and wide-ranging, but not as severe as initially feared, and many effects diminished over time. When lasting setbacks did persist, they were most common among children who were already facing challenges such as financial hardship, limited resources or other disadvantages before the pandemic began.
“This means children’s resilience ensured the pandemic’s consequences were not universally catastrophic, and they weren’t uniform either, which is a cause for optimism,” said Gabriela Livas, co-editor of the special collection of studies and professor and chair of the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences. “In fact, children, including some of the most vulnerable kids, weathered the experience in a variety of ways, and there were many factors beyond the pandemic that affected their trajectory in the years before and after COVID-related shutdowns.”
Livas co-authored one of the 17 studies published in the special section, which focused on children from low-income families in three U.S. cities. She looked specifically at vulnerable children in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who had participated in early childhood programs before the pandemic and were later tracked through elementary school. Teachers reported that most behavioral issues remained stable before and after the pandemic, with no increase in attention problems or aggression and only a modest decline in prosocial skills such as sharing, cooperation, empathy and understanding others’ emotions. The researchers concluded that early reports about the pandemic’s effects on children may have been overly pessimistic. This was a common theme that emerged across the various studies.
“Overall, the evidence in this special section challenges dominant narratives of universal ‘learning loss,’ suggesting instead that COVID-19 interacted with existing inequalities,” said co-editor Anna D. Johnson of Georgetown University. “The research highlights the resilience in children and shows the importance of context in shaping their physical, cognitive and emotional skills over time.”
These findings are featured in the Society for Research in Child Development’s flagship journal, Child Development, in a special section on COVID-19 titled “Children’s Developmental Trajectories in the Long Shadow of COVID-19.” In addition to Livas and Johnson, the collection was co-edited by Seth Pollak of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
