COVID-19 and Children's Well-Being: A Rapid Research Agenda

Abstract

Purpose: Understanding the full impact of COVID-19 on U.S. children, families, and communities is critical to (a) document the scope of the problem, (b) identify solutions to mitigate harm, and (c) build more resilient response systems. We sought to develop a research agenda to understand the short- and long-term mechanisms and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children's healthy development, with the goal of devising and ultimately testing interventions to respond to urgent needs and prepare for future pandemics.

Description: The Life Course Intervention Research Network facilitated a series of virtual meetings that included members of 10 Maternal and Child Health (MCH) research programs, their research and implementation partners, as well as family and community representatives, to develop an MCH COVID-19 Research Agenda. Stakeholders from academia, clinical practice, nonprofit organizations, and family advocates participated in four meetings, with 30-35 participants at each meeting.

Assessment: Investigating the impacts of COVID-19 on children's mental health and ways to address them emerged as the highest research priority, followed by studying resilience at individual and community levels; identifying and mitigating the disparate negative effects of the pandemic on children and families of color, prioritizing community-based research partnerships, and strengthening local, state and national measurement systems to monitor children's well-being during a national crisis.

Conclusion: Enacting this research agenda will require engaging the community, especially youth, as equal partners in research co-design processes; centering anti-racist perspectives; adopting a "strengths-based" approach; and integrating young researchers who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). New collaborative funding models and investments in data infrastructure are also needed.

Keywords: COVID-19; Child; Health equity; Mental health; Research co-design.

Fig. 1

Results of research prioritization polling. Criteria for prioritization included (1) High need and impact (defined as (a)) worth pursuing even with high effort because need is high; (b) addresses the multi-dimensional ecosystem in which children reside; and (c) good use of collaborative resources/assets); (2) Inclusive, anti-racist, collaborative methodologies (defined as (a)) high potential to engage disenfranchised communities and produce high-quality data; (b) designed for and with communities most impacted; (c) leverages research as intervention; and (d) high potential for sharing data, expanding projects); (3) Responsive and transformative (defined as (a)) can accelerate the well-being of children; (b) responsive, adaptive, flexible, strategic; and (c) not just for knowledge’s sake, but to respond to/anticipate challenges, build protective factors and resilience, put in place buffering processes); and (4) Balanced (defined as contributing to a balanced national research agenda). Each attendee had up to 6 votes to allocate. Votes could be used more than once for a single area if desired

Fig. 2

The research landscape: prioritizing life stages and ecosystem levels. Early childhood: children and families of color, children and families with special needs (family level); early childhood care, healthcare, other support services (systems level). Adolescence: youth of color, youth with special needs (community level); service systems: schools, healthcare, mental health, other community support services (systems level). Artwork credit: Giselle Chow for Leapfrog Consulting