Children in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Disruptions and Opportunities

This comment on the contributions to this volume, dedicated to children’s perspectives during the COVID-19 pandemic, identifies some transversal topics that are covered by the authors, namely distance learning, children and social bonding, social distance and construction of the self, and disruption as a chance. Reflecting children’s diverse geographies, these contributions go beyond ideological debates about childhood in the dominant representations of children as vulnerable and incompetent as they reveal both negative and positive impacts of lockdown, like exacerbated inequalities and children’s agency. The phenomenological approach, focusing on children’s understandings of the impact of the pandemic on their subjective well-being, required heightened vigilance about methodological procedures at all stages. This focus on children’s understandings is considered an epistemic opportunity that may favor more child-friendly politics.

The studies in this volume highlight important findings related to children's perspectives during the COVID-19 pandemic and underline potential strategies to address their challenges and concerns. All contributions reflect on the experiences, from children's perspectives, of the constraints and opportunities that the COVID-19 has generated. It is important to underline the double-sided effects of lockdown, as this disruption from "normal life" had not only negative impacts but also positive ones. Therefore, while the Covid-19 pandemic was a situation that never happened before (Fegter & Kost), it also magnified the features of daily routines and notably exacerbated the already existing inequalities experienced by children. The disruption 1 3 of "normal life" also shed a new light on children, revealing their contributions as reflexive actors as it gave them some opportunities to testify abilities that are usually overlooked or even denied in the dominant representations of children as vulnerable and incompetent. The authors of this volume strived to reflect on the perspectives of the interviewed children, putting aside ideological debates about childhood and basing strictly on what it means to be a child in the times of a pandemic, in different settings, cultural contexts and social classes. The contributions also reflect children's diverse geographies, from urban middle-class children in India (Sandhu & Barn), children from Midwestern United States (Newland et al.), urban communities in Cleveland (Benninger et al.) to children in Berlin (Fegter and Kost).

Distance Learning
Sandhu & Barn underline the importance of digital technologies during the COVID-19 national lockdown in India: the 16-to 17-year-old urban middle-class young people experienced confinement with their schools shifting to online delivery of teaching and learning. These technologies mediated especially the experiences of urban middle-class children, and the children's engagements in the digital world were structured by their social class, gender, and geographical locations. India's "media-rich" children were exposed to particular threats and obstacles. This illustrates the paradox of affordance, whereby access to new opportunities is accompanied by new risks, and this may also be a reason why researchers in wellbeing studies find that there is no strict correlation between children's well-being and economic status (Rees et al., 2016). These results suggest that school is not necessarily (and must not necessarily be) the major environment for the development of children's well-being. With qualitative interviews with 11-to 14-year-old children in Berlin, Fegter & Kost also critically address the cultural concepts of school-related well-being. They highlight children's subjective well-being associated with the school lockdowns and distance learning, and contend that these concepts are reproduced in children's discourses. They suggest that children invoke that some structural elements of learning environments are relevant for their wellbeing. The other way round is also observed: structural elements of well-being are also relevant to learning. This highlights the link between the material and the symbolic worlds and suggests that childhood cannot be reduced to just a social construction: specific materialities also build up childhoods in different ways. In my view, these observations contribute to the "ontological turn" in childhood studies (Alanen, 2017;Spyrou, 2019), as they underline the inertia of existing structures. Indeed, Fegter & Koster show that beyond the variety of school experience during the lockdowns, based to a great extent on the arrangements made by the schools and teachers themselves, what remained common was the disruption of familiar routines of schools and school-related learning practices. With time the new arrangements became more regulated. This shows how incidents (here the Covid-19) tend to reinforce the urge for regulation and the tendency to return to "normal". Yet, things that seemed unthinkable before suddenly became possible and this changes the perception of "normality". The "back to normal" tendency is in fact altered by a new normality. But this is actually only limited to the period of the crisis: distance schooling didn't last beyond the crisis and there is no new normality of this kind today.

Children and Social Bonding
Children expressed social solidarity. Children asserted public agency through banal acts of sociability, for example, by conforming to public health measures such as mask-wearing and hand-washing. Children acted as moral agents (protecting the safety of others) and saw themselves as being part of a larger movement of civic responsibility. Children's attitudes contributed a sense of collective effervescence (Fattore et al.). This suggests that agency should not be seen as a difference one can make in the direction of social change but also in the direction of adaptation to new situations and maintenance, or even restoration, of the social bond. The pandemic actually exacerbated the structural social positioning of children: while the lives of children were significantly affected by the decisions taken by adults, children were hardly consulted. Yet, they have contributed a lot to prevent total social disruption. This is just symptomatic of the paradox of agency that children undergo on a daily basis. The paradox of agency is when some social actors (here children) in fact not only contribute to the reproduction of the social system but also invent new forms of social life, mostly under stressing circumstances (here the Covid-19 pandemic), and yet are not recognized as legitimate decisions-makers. The contributors to this volume show that the lives of children and youth have been greatly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic throughout the world. The most significant implications were on their health and well-being. Long-term research on children's well-being have underlined the importance not only of physical protection, but also of the feeling of being listened to (Rees et al., 2016). Children's participation rights, enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989), were impacted as children were by large excluded from consultations about the mitigation strategies and policies regarding the pandemic. This confirms that, in contrast to the scientific attention on children, the general trend in all walks of life is to hardly ask children about their own experiences as adults pretend to "already know". This was also observed in other studies about children's appraisals of lockdowns (Stoecklin et al., 2021).

Social Distance and Construction of the Self
Sandhu & Barn recall that the disparities in the access to the Internet are very important when comparing rural and urban India. Digital education is therefore highly discriminatory, while moderate use of digital and social media looks preferable for one's well-being to both overuse and underuse. The Covid-19 tended to raise heavy use of the digital-rich children. The researchers departed from the mainstream focus on societal anxieties around children's digital media use, and instead shifted attention to study to how children, as reflexive users, engage with technology and shape their own well-being through risk negotiations and digital opportunities conducive to the social construction of the self. Following Callero (2014), who links categories of identity and processes of inequality, the authors consider the self as not just an outcome variable. Children's agency nevertheless is greatly impacted by the availability of resources. The Covid-19 pandemic shifted available resources, and hence, children had to navigate network failure issues, demands of online classrooms, mental health and social relationships, and deploy the affordances of digital technologies to combat loneliness, nurture contact with friends, and explore educational and career resources. This shows how much the social construction of the self in the pandemic was shaped by social distance. Nevertheless, these conditions do not necessarily question the social representation of pedagogized middle-class childhood in India, which remains imbued with the importance of academic success. Moderrisoglu et al. add a very important consideration with regard to the social construction of the self. They show that, for children, one of the basic features of the pandemic was the lengthy time of school closure. The notion of time evolves with age and adults tend to forget and overlook how children experience time, especially in difficult circumstances. It is not time alone but time without schoolmates and friends that is especially long and painful for the children. They were longing for a significant childhood space. The researchers therefore remind us that school is a relational space. Noticeably, they show that in Turkey its importance is even greater for children from a low socioeconomic background. They explored the children's generational and intergenerational through their day-to-day access to education, digital inequalities, housing conditions, and changing context of relations with peers and teachers. These findings suggest that the construction of the self is social by nature. More distance in social interactions therefore also means that more attention must be paid to the vulnerabilities of children's caretakers. With increased difficulties, parents and caretakers are less able to secure children with a significant childhood space. This confirms the relational dimension of agency (Esser, 2016;Leonard, 2016;Oswell, 2012).

Disruption as a Chance
The contributions to this volume show that crisis is a chance to discover the relationships between individuals and social structures, as it uncovers behavioral choices and mechanisms of inequalities that, in "normal" times, are naturalized by the very fact that they remain unconscious. The social disruption was addressed notably by Fattore et al. who showed that besides the health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic represented a social crisis for children. This crisis altered somewhat the representations of children in Australia, with disruptive notions of what a good childhood is. Their qualitative multi-stage study asked children through online semi-structured interviews about their experiences of well-being before the pandemic and during lockdowns. They asked especially about what aspects of life brought on by COVID-19 restrictions they would like to see continue post-lockdown. This is especially interesting and posits a progressive view on children's contributions and agency during the crisis. To highlight what new practices developed by children under these special circumstances is quite telling about what children would prefer anyway in daily routines and how they would like to contribute shaping the world they live in. The authors thus highlight new rituals and ways of organizing time with the help of digital technologies. They underline these new practices as task-based rather than rule-based. Interestingly, children's greater control about their tasks was gained by experiencing slowness. This confirms the fact that the social disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic opened space for more contemplation, paradoxically confronting the stressful time management: other studies have also underlined how children appreciated to have more time, to wake up later, and to have more control about their own agenda (Stoecklin et al., 2021). Several contributions in this volume make a step further in identifying shifts in well-being levels and associated factors. Benninger et al. help us better understand what resources allowed children from urban communities in Cleveland, OH, USA, to continue to flourish despite hardship as their health and well-being were impacted by the pandemic. Gervais et al. show that during the pandemic children and adolescents were concerned by restrictive measures such as lockdowns, social distancing, and the wearing of masks. In their longitudinal mixed study in Quebec, Canada, they aimed at identifying how different experiences contributed to children's and adolescents' well-being through different stages of the pandemic. While two-thirds of the youth interviewed reported a normal level of well-being, 22% reported a low level of well-being and 18% a high level of well-being. Among the latter two, the researchers identified two configurations of interactions between children and their environment. By comparing the discourses of these three groups, the researchers identified favorable and unfavorable experiences for their well-being and highlight the importance of activities, relationships, support, and representations of children and adolescents. But, in general, it remains difficult to ascertain to what extent the pandemic shifted the proportions of children with low, middle or high well-being. More longitudinal studies are needed.

From an Epistemic Opportunity…
The contributors to this volume all show that the pandemic and associated measures have widened the gap between the well-off and the poor. Notably, Moderrisoglu et al. underline how available resources and their allocation are reflected in time use. Newland et al. also highlight differences between urban and rural children: the vulnerability of the latter has been increased by the pandemic. They experience a greater variety of risk factors that increase their vulnerability to physical and mental health disparities. Yet, and despite of local arrangements and shifts in children's agency, and while the vulnerabilities among the already disadvantaged groups have increased and gender inequalities have also widened, there seems to be no substantial change occurring in the dominant social representations of childhood. Covid-19 might probably remain more an epistemic than a political opportunity. This "epistemic opportunity" (Fegter & Kost) was seized with much relevance by the contributors to this volume. The authors notably reconstructed the advantages that children ascribe to the new normalities and hence greatly contribute to the theoretical discourse on factors of school-related well-being or well-being in learning environments from the perspective of children. In order to achieve the endeavor to empirically document children's experiences of COVID-19 and associated measures, the researchers used a variety of participatory methodology and techniques, from semi-structured interviews and mapping exercises, to online discussions and teleconferencing, with sometimes longitudinal protocols (Gervais et al.). Children were asked about what they appreciated and disliked, notably with regard to learning conditions. The phenomenological approach, focusing on children's understandings of the impact of the pandemic on their contexts and well-being, required heightened vigilance about methodological procedures at all stages. Researchers already know that the hierarchic distance between the inquirers (adults) and the inquired (children) can be balanced by child-friendly techniques during interviews. Yet, they must also pay special attention to the coding phase, as is for instance illustrated by verification among coders, identification and resolution of discrepancies (Newland et al.). To listen to children requires a "methodology from the margins" (Fegter & Kost) allowing an analytical process based on the experiences of those who are usually unheard.

… to Child-Friendly Politics
The epistemic opportunity is nevertheless contributing to child-friendly politics. The authors argue that children's experience of contingency during the pandemic shows that things could be different than they are: the established structures and practices are not absolutely necessary, as they could also work differently. The Covid-19 therefore questions the taken-for-granted reflections on teaching, and school-related well-being that seemed so self-evident. It was for example unthinkable that such a strongly embedded institution as schooling could from one day to the other could take place from home in fully digital ways. The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted social life, and hence also the "normality" of subordinated children. Any crisis like this reveals other potential "normalities" that are either already experienced at the margins, or new practices that are necessary to adapt to a new situation. It shows that actors at the margins are unheard because their normalities are hardly thinkable or utterable until they are listened to. If children have been somehow recognized as valid contributors for the new practices that were rendered necessary to adapt to the lockdowns, they might also be recognized as valid shapers of other normalities in the long run, like being more systematically consulted on every question that concerns them, a right enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, art. 12). The almost universal ratification of the UNCRC means that the whole world seems to pay attention to the fate of children. This volume contributes to make children heard and, maybe, a bit more respected as reflexive social actors that should be better included not only in remedial strategies but in daily life. Or will the politicians wait for the next pandemic to learn a lesson that researchers in childhood studies have taught time and again?… Children in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Disruptions and…

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