Although, fortunately the COVID-19 pandemic has had a minimal epidemiological impact on children, its wider repercussions on them have been destabilising, to say the least.
Owing to the closure of essential structures like schools and clinics, homes and households with children have had to take on a more frontline and hands-on role in the provision of such basic rights as the education, health and leisure of children.
On top of all this, many parents and families have been facing their own difficulties as a result of wage reduction or loss and the challenge of juggling the additional support to their children and their work commitments.
The effects of this sudden seismic shift in the distribution of responsibilities for the upbringing of children are not hard to deduce: 1) the well-being of children suffered since even the most resourceful homes and families could not adequately replace the nurturing role of the school and society; 2) inequalities between children, which the State especially had in normal times, to some extent contained, widened and grew since children’s families and homes stepped in from very unequal starting points of financial, logistical and cultural means and capital to make up for the reduced presence of the state as represented by the education set-ups and systems, healthcare services and society in general.
The functions of the state and other service providers as enhancers of the well-being of children and as levellers of social inequalities between children were undermined by the pandemic.
Children missed the daily, direct face-to-face contact and relationship with their teachers, doctors, spiritual leaders, extended family members such as grandparents and cousins, schoolmates and friends, play and physical activity.
By ‘missed’ I do not mean simply that children felt a nostalgic longing for direct contact with these significant others, which impinged negatively on their mood and mental health. I also mean that the real developmental need of children for play and personal relationships with significant others outside their immediate family went largely unmet over the past months, impacting their individual development. This was the case especially with pre-school and early schoolchildren, whose development hinges on physical contact with objects and people much more than that of older children.
One cannot underestimate the stress and anxiety experienced by children during the pandemic. Children reported lack of privacy, isolation and, sometimes, loneliness. Children in abusive households could not have respite from the toxic environment of their families. Access to the other parent in some instances became problematic.
The function of the state and other service providers as enhancers of the well-being of children and as levellers of social inequalities between children were undermined by the pandemic
Because personal relationships require a reciprocal physical presence, no amount or means of remote contact could ever completely bridge the distance which separated children from their teachers, doctors and so many other key figures during the pandemic.
Nevertheless, remote contact, powered by modern ICT tools, helped children continue engaging with many of those people and organisations involved in their upbringing. Malta’s highly- developed ICT infrastructure and the widespread diffusion of ICT tools before the pandemic, together with the state’s intervention in the wake of the pandemic to supply these tools to those children who did not have them, laid the groundwork for this engagement.
Upon this groundwork, it was disconcerting to observe a very wide variance in the actual use of ICT tools by professional organisations and practitioners to keep the developmental process alive.
Children with chronic health problems or with disabilities were hardly able to engage remotely with therapeutic services; some schoolchildren were offered rudimentary forms of remote engagement with their students, such as e-mail, while others benefitted from more interactive means such as live lessons.
As a result, many children, especially those with special needs or learning difficulties, did not benefit as much as they needed to from the remote engagement with their teachers and other professionals during the pandemic, which caused them to fall behind in their development. Moreover, with children spending more time online, their exposure to the risk of cyber-harm, including cyber-bullying, increased.
Let this pandemic serve as a reminder of the need to invest more heavily in ICT in order to maximise its benefits and minimise its risks in normal non-emergency situations and enable a more seamless transition to remote engagement if and when contingencies like this pandemic arise in the future. This also requires adjusting our regulatory frameworks to ensure that all children have the opportunity to interact remotely with their teachers and other professionals in the best possible manner.
There is no doubt that children’s ability to cope with such a challenging and unprecedented situation depended to a large degree on how well their parents or guardians helped them reorganise their lives around the constraints imposed by the pandemic. This was no easy task for any parent or guardian, many of whom struggled to give structure to their children’s days at home, including coaxing them to go outdoors, when this was made possible, for much needed physical activity.
However, it was doubly hard for households that were hit hard by the pandemic in terms of work, finances and well-being and/or that lacked the cultural means to support their children. These difficulties manifested among other ways in children effectively dropping out of school through failure to participate in online learning.
Hence the function of the state and society as a leveller of social inequalities between children was less effective during the pandemic. This points to the need to expand our outreach to disadvantaged households to help them develop their own internal resources and access the necessary external support so that they can be of help to their children in any situation.
Despite its myriad difficulties and challenges, the pandemic enabled children and parents to spend more time together and to renew or rediscover that spiritual connection between them which the hustle and bustle of the pre-COVID-19 routine had somewhat obscured. My hope is that this all-important parent-child rapport can grow stronger even as life returns to normal.
Pauline Miceli, Commissioner for Children