Geography of children’s worry during the COVID-19 pandemic: insights into variations, influences, and implications

ABSTRACT

Children face many threats that have implications for their future. Empirical evidence on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on children’s health and its variation across geography remains limited. Parents (n = 340) and their primary school-aged children in five Australian states completed anonymised online questionnaires early during the pandemic in mid-2020. COVID-19-related forms of worry were measured, and contributing variables were examined. Most children were worried: 89% were worried about contracting the virus, and 79% were worried about playing outdoors. Forms of worry varied by ethnic background. There were geographical patterns in variables contributing to children’s worry aligning with COVID-19 morbidity and mortality across all states. Parents’ characteristics of age and history of distress symptoms, daily exposure to pandemic-related news, and parents themselves being worried predicted children’s worry. Technology use lacked predictive power. The outcome has implications with international relevance: children living in stressful environments, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, are highly vulnerable despite not personally being at a high health risk. During health crises, parents are urged to limit children’s exposure to unfiltered news and care for their children’s and their own mental health. Timely intervention and better access to mental health care may help mitigate the impact of health crises on children. Listening to children’s voices and addressing the diverse needs of all communities can promote equitable children’s well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• children’s forms of worries
• geography
• spatial and statistical analyses
• Australia

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants for their time in completing the online survey. The authors are also very grateful to the journal’s anonymous peer reviewers for their thoughtful comments and the journal's editor Dr Harriot Beazley. They all provided great insights to improve the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

RZ: literature search, the study’s conceptualisation, questionnaire construction, preparing and obtaining ethics approval, building the online survey, disseminating the survey link, data analysis, data interpretation, drafting and finalising the manuscript. RN: Review and test the questionnaire after construction, giving feedback on the statistical analysis. RN, OG, and AD reviewed the manuscript and provided feedback.

Compliance with ethical standards

The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work have been approved by the appropriate ethics committee (HRE2018-0683) and performed according to ethical standards.

Consent to participate

Informed online consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [RZ], upon request.

Notes

1 The broad group of Oceanian, as per ABS, includes Australian people who are: Australian, Australian Aboriginal, Australian South Sea Islander and Torres Strait Islander. People from Southern and Eastern European or North-West European are grouped under European. Asian people are from South-East Asian, North-East Asian or Southern and Central Asian; Middle Eastern were also grouped with Asian. Others involved people from the Americas. Further details on the Oceanian people are found in the Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups (ASCCEG), 2019 | Australian Bureau of Statistics (abs.gov.au). Further details on the broad groups are found under 1249.0 - Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups (ASCCEG), 2011 (abs.gov.au).

Additional information

Funding

At the time of the analyses for this study, RZ was a PhD student and a recipient of a Research Training Program (RTP) scholarship from the Australian government. Third-party survey expense was covered by the study research budget.