Care and Coronavirus

This introductory chapter provides the context for this edited collection: Care and Coronavirus: Perspectives on Children, Youth and Families which aims to understand care in the context of COVID-19, the practices, experiences and potential futures of it for children, young people and families. In this chapter, the authors begin by exploring COVID-19 and its implications for children, young people and families. This includes a consideration of how particular discourses of childhood and youth often led to the marginalisation of children in care policy and practice during the lockdown periods. The authors then discuss interdisciplinary literature on care to identify directions in policy, practice and research, drawing attention to the political nature of care and the need for scholars of childhood, youth and family to engage with these critical and political approaches to care. The authors argue that developments in the field of Childhood Studies can be brought into productive dialogue with care to forge new ways of thinking through care and childhood. The final part of the chapter provides an overview of the ensuing chapters and concludes with the implications of this work for future research, policy and practice. The authors argue that COVID-19 heightened the attention paid to care and the ways in which care is vital for the maintenance of ourselves and the world around us, while also cautioning about the inequalities and the commodification of care that was revealed in these times. The authors end with a call for reflection on the failures and successes of caring during the pandemic and in its aftermath so we might plan a more caring, hopeful future.

This chapter presents an international review of the experiences of children and parents regarding care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic profoundly impacted children and families, magnifying the influence of governmental policies, socio-economic disparities and cultural contexts on children's experiences and exacerbating global inequalities. Vulnerable families faced increased challenges affecting children's rights and well-being, while the transition to digital learning highlighted the critical need for equitable access to technology. Despite extensive documentation of these challenges, research focusing on the pandemic's impact on young children's development, well-being, socialization and learning opportunities, as well as the experiences of parents/carers, remains limited. This scarcity stems from the pandemic's constraints on research activities, requiring reliance on online methods and the increased burdens on parents/carers, making participation in research more challenging.

Employing the PRISMA 2020 method for a literature review, this chapter aggregates international research findings on the subject, examining the impacts of COVID-19 on health and well-being, knowledge of the pandemic, effects on learning, educational strategies, online activity engagement and collaboration with Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services. It concludes with a synthesis of insights and recommendations drawn from the reviewed literature.

The chapter contributes to a comprehensive framework for understanding the pandemic's impact on young children and their families, emphasising the importance of targeted interventions, equitable resource distribution and ongoing support for the ECEC sector to address the challenges and opportunities presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and future crises.

This chapter discusses research exploring preschool practitioners' beliefs about child poverty and their responses to it before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, in 2014, the authors’ research found notable levels of poverty insensitivity amongst preschool practitioners within prescribed formal pedagogical contexts emphasising early education over care. With COVID-19 pandemic, some commentators speculated care's place in public consciousness would be raised allowing it to go viral across society. Exploring this, the authors replicated the earlier study in 2021. Drawing upon these recent data from England, the authors consider preschool practitioners' views about the extent to which COVID-19 posed challenges for children in poverty and how much they agreed poverty was something they needed to be sensitive to during the pandemic. The authors then examine preschool practitioners' pedagogical adaptions and their prioritising of care alongside early education during the pandemic. The chapter ends by questioning conjecture about a ‘new normal’ emerging in preschool, allowing pedagogical space for an energised focus upon care.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact upon early childhood practice. This chapter presents reflections from discussions with practitioners based on their experiences through and coming out the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst acknowledging the extreme circumstances for the practitioners, children, families and the settings, the authors sought to value and share these contributions in a way that highlight developmentally appropriate practice speech around language delay, delays in physical development, relationship and self-regulation problems, mental health and well-being issues and children's safeguarding. The authors place a strong focus on young children's developmental outcomes, which should be a priority for early years research. The narratives presented should also be of interest to policymakers to aid them in developing strategies to ensure young children's holistic development.

This chapter reports on a study that examined the impact of COVID-19 within a context of poverty and existing emotional vulnerabilities amongst girls in an informal settlement in South Africa. Findings highlight the young people's resilience, hope and determination to stand together and draw upon each other's strengths through extremely difficult experiences. Data were collected through a survey with 19 girls aged between 12 and 17 years and analysed using Maslow's theory of human motivation (1943) and Brammer's crisis theory (1985). Living conditions and socio-economic status influenced the girls' experiences of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Social distancing, in particular, was found to be a challenge in their living conditions. Despite this, the study found the girls to be sophisticated caring agents; they were resourceful, supportive of each other and resolute in their plans for the future, despite the impact of the pandemic. Recommendations are made for further research with female adolescents to inform future strategies and interventions in South Africa's informal settlements.

Managing public ‘affect’ was a critical component of Aotearoa New Zealand's COVID-19 policy approach, which was predicated on collective emotional feelings of calmness, compassion and trust. A long history of health promotion efforts have involved co-opting children as tools to manipulate (adult) public affect towards motivating behavioural change or accepting health interventions. Little research has yet considered the consequences of objectifying children for affect management in the name of public health. The Pandemic Generation study compared the perspectives of Auckland children aged 7–11, generated through co-drawing comics about their pandemic experience, with a critical discourse analysis of children's representation in New Zealand COVID-19 public health messaging. In this chapter, I argue that by leveraging performative care for children to manipulate an adult public affect, the New Zealand government erased children's subjectivities, their care-giving roles and contributions, further disenfranchising children as members of the ‘public’ in public health.

This practitioner chapter is a reflection on how health visitors (HVs) working in a health and social care partnership (HSCP) in Scotland worked safely and innovatively throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to build and sustain professional relationships with families and uphold children's rights, continuing to empower and support families despite the necessary restrictions. HVs shared their lived experiences of working through the pandemic in a variety of ways including contributing to data collection for the author’s PhD research and through reflective discussion. All quotes within this reflection are anonymised.

COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the nature of support available to new parents. Previously we conducted a study to explore parents' experiences of shifting to ‘digitalised’ caregiving specifically focussing on parents' access to online parenting groups. That study is re-examined in this chapter, presenting parents' narratives about their attempts to provide the best environment for their children while most of their face-to-face support networks were unavailable. The analysis aims to determine parents' constructions of the ‘COVID baby’, a term introduced by Brown (2021), although never defined in detail. Three themes were identified: ‘Hopes and fears for the babies’ future’; ‘Peaceful and oblivious babies’; ‘Babies as a perceived mirror of parents’ abilities’. Parents in this study depicted a positive portrait in which babies thrived at home; however, they expressed worries about their children’s future, as they lacked opportunities for development and socialisation usually offered by paid or unpaid group activities. To compensate, some parents engaged in extra labour at home in the face of home-made activities, inspired by previously attended group sessions. We argue that new parents, specifically mothers, are often pressured to display ‘intensive mothering’ to provide the best opportunities for development for their babies and fulfil gender and class expectations: such pressure leads to increased consumerism. Limitations of this approach have been emphasised by the simpler life that the lockdown forced on them, with apparent benefits to the babies' well-being. On the other hand, the need for new parents to be connected to nurturing networks of support remains essential.

The closure of schools and nurseries during the COVID-19 lockdowns triggered the re-insourcing of childcare to the home, sparking extensive public debate and academic research on the pandemic's potential impact on gender equality (see, for example, Burgess and Goldman, 2021; Vandecasteele et al. 2022). My PhD research, which explores parents' decision-making influences when planning care during their child's first year in the UK context, coincided with COVID-19. The coinciding of my data collection with COVID-19 (seven online discussions with a total of 36 participants and 12 follow up interviews, 10 which include partners) created microcosms in which wider public debates were echoed. My research draws on the Capability Approach (CA) (Sen, 2009) to conceptualise parents' capabilities to share leave as they aspire to and employs dialogical narrative analysis (DNA) (Riessman, 2008) to explore how gendered parenting norms are constitutive of parents’ care capabilities. In this chapter, I draw on feminist ethics of care to explore the disruption of gendered parenting norms, in the COVID-19 context, within parents' decision-making and a possible ‘reimagining’ of the value attributed to care (Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen, 2021; Tronto, 2017). My findings support anticipation of what the promise of greater flexibility could bring as a result of increased visibility of caregiving during COVID-19. However, I also find evidence which supports the caution previously recommended of the need to reflect on work cultures and the predominance of masculine ideal worker norms in the UK (Chung et al. 2021).

In this chapter, we reflect together on the unfolding lockdowns in England. This reflection is presented as a conversation between foster parent (Fiona) and young person (Cuong), exploring the dynamics of care that marked that time period. Through our conversation we are able to point out the multidirectionality of the care we both gave and experienced during these times.

This chapter presents a research study which explored the experiences of teenage secondary school girls in England whose schooling was disrupted by the pandemic and implementation of lockdowns. We begin by setting the context for school-based research with children and argue children and young people experience ever-increasing pressure to act as redemptive future agents and thus sites of capital accumulation. Despite this we go on to argue that there were important moments, practices and experiences of care during the lockdown periods that can be harnessed to help resist the capitalist logics that exert such pressures upon current school children. We explain the process of using arts-based methods to engage pupils in discussing their experiences and how these methods are based on caring practices which we argue are essential for research on care. Our findings suggest the girls had positive experiences of schooling and lockdowns and we present some significant examples of caring agency that young people demonstrated in contrast to the negative media discourses about home learning. We do not seek to obscure the difficulties that these young people experienced, but in highlighting their caring agency, we demonstrate the complexity of lockdown experiences and illustrate the role and importance of care in the unbounded space of the school.

This chapter discusses the care experiences of a group of parents and a grandparent working at a Higher Education Institution in England and homeschooling during the pandemic. The group established an informal, work-based, online peer support group during and beyond the first COVID-19 lockdown. This chapter analyses a survey of group members and the group's online chat data to explore experiences of homeschooling and participating in the group. It represents a pioneering case study in how a group of parent-workers coped with the conditions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the group was underpinned by an ethic of care, based on reciprocal care relationships. The group developed ways of caring together and sought to influence and create more caring working practices and cultures. Whilst it is possible to create small pockets of more inclusive, supportive and caring spaces within education workplaces, we conclude that the challenge to create supportive family-friendly working environments remains.

This reflective chapter draws upon my experiences as a secondary school teacher in England during the COVID-19 lockdowns. I reflect on the difficulties of teaching and providing care towards the young people at our school, who were trying to navigate their education at such a difficult time. In this piece, I conclude that education is intertwined with all aspects of wellbeing and that through care for this wellbeing, education can flourish.

This short reflection considers experiences of providing care as an education professional during the lockdown periods in England. My experiences as a trainee teacher and then as an hourly paid teaching assistant highlight how often the many important caring professionals were also left in particularly precarious situations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Children's Hearings System is a Scottish welfare-based tribunal-based system in which decisions are made about the care and protection of children in conflict with the law and/or in need of additional care and protection. The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the rapid implementation of a virtual Children's Hearings System. This system, which operated as the sole mechanism through which decisions were made between March and July 2020, continued to be used alongside in-person and hybrid Hearing formats for the duration of the pandemic. Early research into the use of virtual Hearings identified that their use presented significant barriers to participation, particularly in relation to the impacts of digital literacy and digital poverty. However, much of this research focused upon the experiences of adult participants in Hearings and failed to capture the experiences of children. In this chapter, we present findings from a qualitative study designed to explore the impact of virtual Hearings upon the participation and rights of children. In doing so, we demonstrate that virtual Hearings acted as both a barrier and facilitator of children's participation.

Millions of children participate in community sports clubs and leagues each weekend across the UK, and other countries. The rates of participation and the cultural significance of these sports in different countries are not always matched by recognition or support from governments. Policy interest in sport in the UK has, in recent years at least, tended to focus on elite performance and the hosting of events such as the Olympics and the UEFA European Championships. Commitment to grassroots and community sports has waned, or been limited to how sport and/or physical activity can help to deliver other policy goals. The lack of funding provided to community sports clubs can lead to young people with limited resources being excluded from clubs. Inequalities in participation in sport and physical activity were exacerbated during lockdowns and restrictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic. This chapter explores some of the contemporary challenges facing grassroots youth sports clubs and highlights the possible advantages of adopting a different approach to them, including consideration of the informal care provided by sports clubs and the role that they can play during critical moments in children and families' everyday lives.

In this chapter, we reflect collectively on the role of Youth Work during the COVID-19 lockdowns in England. Our contribution, presented as a conversation about practice during this time, reflects on the status of Youth Work and argues for its critical role in providing care for young people.

Far from being ‘a great equaliser’, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing inequities and produced new ones. Yet, in the face of the multiple crises which the COVID-19 pandemic amplified, including a crisis of care, novel imaginaries and practices emerged to navigate the instability it wrought. For instance, although children were largely out of focus during the pandemic, when they appeared in discussions it was often along well-worn paths bound up in the chameleon-like figure of the child as the risk and at-risk. Yet by paying close attention to children's own experiences, we can see multiple examples of their care for and about Others. I make the case that this care was radical in the context of Coronavirus, not least because the tropes of the risky or at-risk child threatened to fracture possibilities of intergenerational solidarities necessary for navigating the pandemic and important for addressing widespread injustices.