Almost Half Of Children Saw Their Social And Emotional Skills Worsen During The Pandemic - And Economic Turbulence Played A Role

6th August 2023

Nearly half of parents (47%) reported that their child's social and emotional skills had worsened during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

By contrast, just one in six children saw their social and emotional development improve over this period. These statistics highlight that the pandemic's impact on children stretches well beyond lost learning.

These results are drawn from a unique survey run by IFS and the UCL Institute of Education in February 2021, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. The researchers asked parents 13 questions about their child's behaviours (for example, how often the child appeared worried, easily lost confidence, or had tantrums) both in February 2021 and, retrospectively, a year earlier.

While children from all backgrounds saw their social and emotional skills worsen, some groups were more affected than others. Children aged 4 to 7 years were 10 percentage points more likely to have seen their social and emotional development worsen than 12- to 15-year-olds (52% versus 42%). And, unlike previous research into academic learning loss, the study finds no evidence that children in disadvantaged families fared worse.

Most notably, children whose parents' pre-COVID employment situation changed were far more likely to see their social and emotional skills worsen. This happened even in cases where parents were furloughed, pointing to the important negative impact that parental job instability can have on children even when not accompanied by significant earnings loss.

The study demonstrates that economic instability affects children's development - the relationship is not just down to other shared causes. There are several explanations for this link, including actual and expected earnings loss caused by job instability, as well as the adverse effects that job instability had on parental well-being. These results highlight that economic turbulence affects not just the worker him or herself, but also has knock-on impacts on children.

Andrew McKendrick, Research Economist at IFS and an author of the report, said: ‘During the COVID-19 pandemic, children from all backgrounds saw their social and emotional skills worsen considerably. Children lived through many changes during these years: school closures, lack of contact with friends and family, and potentially devastating severe illness or death among loved ones. Our research shows that another important driver of children's declining skills was the economic disruptions experienced by their parents, whether or not those disruptions led to a large income loss. With the cost of living crisis currently hitting many families' budgets, our findings are a reminder that economic uncertainty can have multi-generational impacts.’

Josh Hillman, Director of Education at the Nuffield Foundation, said: ‘This important research highlights yet another adverse and compounding effect the pandemic had on children and young people, particularly those whose parents stopped working or were furloughed. Children’s social and emotional development is important, not only in its own right, but also in supporting their capacity to learn and achieve in school, which in turn can bolster their longer-term outcomes.’

Executive summary
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many aspects of children’s lives, with impacts on their social and emotional development as well as their educational attainment. School closures increased social and emotional difficulties (Blanden et al., 2021); lack of contact with friends and extended family left some children without a trusted adult to turn to (Newlove-Delgado et al., 2021); and severe illness and death of loved ones increased (Slomski, 2021; Liang, Becker and Rice, 2022).

In this report, we consider another channel through which the pandemic may have affected children’s social and emotional development: the disruption to parents’ experiences in the labour market created by lockdown restrictions.

As in many other countries, national lockdowns and wider social distancing measures severely disrupted the UK’s labour market, with many businesses shutting down. The government introduced a range of policies, such as the furlough scheme, to insure workers against the impacts of these closures. Even so, a shifting public health and policy landscape meant that many families had some financial losses during the first year of the pandemic, and/or faced high levels of uncertainty.

Taken together, parents’ labour market experiences during the pandemic could have affected both a household’s resources and the quality and quantity of time parents and children spent together. Since systematic reviews of children’s mental health during the pandemic consistently suggest that higher socio-economic status and better relationships with parents were protective factors (Ng and Ng, 2022; Theberath et al., 2022), analysing the role that parents’ labour market experiences played in shaping children’s outcomes is crucial for understanding how the pandemic affected children and their development.

Key findings
1. Overall, parents reported that their children’s social and behavioural difficulties increased during the first year of the pandemic. Nearly half of parents reported that their child had more socio-emotional difficulties in February 2021 than a year earlier, while around one in six reported fewer challenges. Parents of girls and younger children, and those who were furloughed, were more likely to report worsening in their children’s socio-emotional skills. Among the sample whose survey responses can be linked with administrative education records, we find that less disadvantaged children were more likely to see their (parent-reported) socio-emotional skills worsen, though these differences are not statistically significant.

2. Around half of families in our sample saw no change in their labour market status during the first year of the pandemic, including a third of households where all parents remained employed and working throughout. But the families who did have changes in the labour market had diverse experiences - this group was roughly evenly split between households where at least one parent was unemployed for much of the pandemic, households where at least one parent was furloughed most of the time, and households where working was interrupted with shorter bursts of furlough.

3. Overall, the socio-emotional skills of children whose families had experienced at least one transition in the labour market were nearly 20% of a standard deviation lower than those of children whose families had stable labour market experiences. Much of this difference existed before the pandemic. But even after accounting for pre-pandemic skills, the children whose families experienced at least one change saw, on average, their socio-emotional development worsen by about 9% of a standard deviation more than those whose families remained consistently employed or unemployed throughout.

4. Overall, the socio-emotional skills of children whose parents had stable labour market experiences throughout the pandemic - whether employed or unemployed the whole time - held up better on average than the skills of children whose families faced more economic instability. This suggests that it was the stability of parents’ labour market experiences, rather than being in any particular economic state, that was an important determinant of children’s socio-emotional development during the pandemic.

5. Labour market instability increased parental stress and led to declines in both actual and expected future earnings. These could be important channels through which increased economic uncertainty can have knock-on effects on children’s socio-emotional development.

6. Our findings demonstrate the importance of protecting families during periods of significant economic uncertainty in order to reduce the significant human capital and well-being costs such uncertainty can have not only for the directly affected adults but also for their children.

Read the full report HERE
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