Why Households with Young Children Warrant Our Attention and Support During (and After) the COVID-19 Pandemic
by Philip Fisher, Joan Lombardi, & Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor
When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, few of us were prepared for the changes that would occur in our daily lives. In a matter of weeks, workplaces, educational settings, family life, and whole communities were dramatically transformed.
No sector of society or region of the country has been insulated from the effects. However, children are expected to be the subgroup of our population that will bear the biggest brunt of the pandemic. Their education, food, safety, health and well-being are all at risk.
In order to mitigate immediate and long-term impacts of the pandemic, speed economic recovery, and ensure future prosperity, households with children—especially with children birth through age five—must be among the highest priorities for federal, state, and local resources, policies, and programs.
Households with children—especially with children birth through age five—must be among the highest priorities.
Why households with infants and young children?
Decades of scientific research show that experiences in the early years of a child’s life play a crucial role in building the architecture of the developing brain, and also in programming an individual’s biology to be prepared for the world that awaits. Stressful early life experiences can permanently impact a number of our children’s brain and biological systems, increasing the risk for both learning difficulties and lifelong health problems such as obesity and heart disease.
Equally important, nurturing relationships with adults, including parents, grandparents and other relatives, childcare providers, and other community members can serve as powerful buffers to counterbalance the effects of adversity during these critical early years.
Nurturing relationships with adults can serve as powerful buffers to counterbalance the effects of adversity during these critical early years.
Long before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, science-based communications about the critical importance of early childhood and early relational health were part of larger national and global trends towards investment, innovation, and progress in the early childhood ecosystem.
However, as much as the increasing focus on early childhood prior to the pandemic was inspiring, ongoing effort was needed to assure measurable population level impacts.
In fact, in pre-pandemic America, households with young children were already facing increasingly high levels of daily stress and distress, and were often isolated from extended family members and others in their communities from whom they might receive emotional and material support.
Many areas of the country were also experiencing shortages of quality childcare.
Although it is safe to say that households with young children across the entire socioeconomic spectrum were experiencing challenges, these issues were greatest in socially and economically marginalized communities, communities of color, and other subpopulations who experience structural inequalities.
Now, with the arrival of COVID-19, households with young children have been hit especially hard. Reports on the well-being of such households since the onset of the pandemic (including data from a nationally representative survey that researchers at the University of Oregon’s Center for Translational Neuroscience conducted the week of April 6) document troubling increases in difficulties across a range of areas, including child social-emotional well-being, household economic security, physical health of the household, access to early learning and childcare, caregiver/parent mental health, and household basic needs.
Moreover, many of the supports that families facing adversity rely on are beginning to fail under the pressures imposed by social distancing, increased demand, and insufficient funding.
Given the robust scientific evidence of the negative effects of early life adversity on brain, biology, and behavior — especially when adults’ ability to provide nurturing care is compromised by the kinds of circumstances that COVID-19 has imposed — we must act immediately and effectively.
Federal stimulus checks and other relief were important first steps.
Many state and local governments have followed suit with additional policies focusing on parents and young children who are facing the greatest adversities.
Why launch a new study?
Next, we must begin to hear directly from parents about what they need.
Specifically, we need actionable, high quality scientific data, gathered from those with young children in their care, that will allow federal, state, and local policy makers to make the best use of resources.
To this end, the University of Oregon’s Center for Translational Neuroscience has launched a project called Rapid Assessment of Pandemic Impact on Development in Early Childhood (RAPID-EC).
Essential to the project’s impact are strong partnerships with a number of visionary organizations, including:
Private philanthropic foundations to support the work.
Early childhood family-focused organizations with large online networks of parents and other caregivers, who can help us recruit geographically and demographically diverse households.
Early childhood advocacy and policy organizations, who will provide input into the content of the questions we ask and serve as mobilization channels for the reports we generate.
In designing RAPID-EC, we quickly recognized a need to collect data at very frequent intervals, because both the evolution of the pandemic and the federal and state responses to it have been difficult to predict.
As such, surveys will be conducted on a weekly basis.
We further recognized the need for large nationally representative samples for each weekly survey. These representative samples will allow us to not only make statements about the overall well-being of households with young children in the US, but also to examine specific subgroups based on characteristics like household income, race and ethnicity, and region of the country.
How will this information help infants and young children?
The information we will be gathering, analyzing, and communicating will be influential in the following ways:
It will be an up to date source of information about the current status of households with young children, with respect to child, caregiver, and relational health, as well as the availability and need for supports and services.
It will provide a source for information about trends over time, beginning with the first survey completed on April 9 and moving forward.
It will demonstrate how changes in federal and state policies implemented at a specific time are associated with alterations in trends in the data we gather in the weekly survey.
Information from the surveys will allow us to highlight the remarkable resiliency of many households, even under the most difficult of circumstances, and celebrate the many powerful and inspiring ways in which households with young children are rising to the challenges they face. We will be able to identify activities associated with well-being in the face of adversity across all income brackets, ethnicities, and regions of the country.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it will be a strong voice for the needs of specific groups of parents and young children who are under the most pressure from the immediate and long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the weeks and months ahead, we will be publishing weekly data updates as well as policy briefs on key issues emerging from the surveys.
This information will be mobilized to federal, state, and local officials whose responsibilities include the health and well-being of infants and young children. In doing so, we hope not only to address the most immediate needs of parents and young children during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to lay the foundation for a strong national network of family support in the post-pandemic United States.