"Approximately 1.2 billion school children have had their education put on hold due to COVID-related school closures. In fact, between 27/03/2020 and 22/04/2020, more than 90% of the total enrolled world-wide learners were subject to country-wide school closures and confined at home...
As of July 7th, Canada has suffered 8708 adult COVID-19 deaths but no deaths in children...
Children being kept home have a higher risk of anxiety and depression (Xie et al. 2020), greater screen time (Media Habits of Children and Teens in Quarantine 2020), and a greater risk of physical abuse (Sidpra et al. 2020). For vulnerable families, the loss of important services from schools, including counseling, psychological services, special education, and nutritional support, is a major concern. The economic effects of parents being kept home to provide child care are particularly severe for disadvantaged families. For many of these families, childhood nutrition suffers due to loss of school meals (Dunn et al. 2020). Parents without the economic means to stay at home and educate their children because they are essential workers may not be able to keep their children at grade level... Preschool and children in early primary grades are most vulnerable as they often do not respond to online learning and are at a critical time of social, cognitive, and intellectual development. The long-term importance of preschool and early childhood education has been well documented with studies demonstrating effects into adulthood. A large body of research has demonstrated long-term impacts of lack of access to preschool and early childhood education, including poorer performance on intelligence, cognitive skills, and standardized tests; higher incidences of teen pregnancy and illicit drug use; lower graduation rates; lower employment rates and lower annual median earnings; higher arrest rates; and higher incidences of hypertension, diabetes, and depression (Campbell et al. 2012; Reynolds et al. 2018; Schweinhart et al. 2005; Meloy et al. 2019). Children with special needs are most severely affected as they are cut off from institutional supports... Although the long-term effects of our current COVID-19-related schooling policy are largely unknown, it is safe to say that there are likely to be several unintended consequences which we will recognize only after the data are compiled."
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.