Much has been now written on the unprecedented social disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic deepened existing inequalities and created new social ruptures, with groups and communities already disadvantaged more likely to face disproportionately higher risks of contagion and also be more exposed to adverse social and economic consequences caused by measures to prevent the spread of the disease (Maestripieri, 2021). Households and individuals in most parts of the world were forced to reorganise their daily lives as part of the extensive responses taken by governments, confronted with how private lives are constituted publicly and politically. COVID-19 presented an existential challenge and as Pfaller (2020) argued, strategies to prevent the spread of the virus, represented a form of cultural ‘abjection’, against the virus as a microscopic pathogen, and against people at the frontline fighting the spread of the disease, through what Kubacka et al. (2021) describe as pandemic rage. Most shamefully this was evident in the increase in violence against healthcare workers during the height of the pandemic (Kuhlmann et al., 2023). The response to the pandemic also demonstrated the possibility of progressive social response, at the level of politics and in everyday interactions, amongst intimates and between strangers. Massive increases in social spending to replace lost incomes and the rapid shift to the provision of online services in health (Monaghesh & Hajizadeh, 2020) and education (Li & Lalani, 2020) demonstrated the possibility of what governments could do to support its citizens. Incidents of pandemic rage were matched by expressions of solidarity within neighbourhoods and across national boundaries (O’Brien, 2021).

We also saw the uneven effects of the pandemic on children. At a global level, the COVID-19 pandemic changed children’s daily lives drastically (Stoecklin et al., 2021). The closure of schools has been estimated to have affected 90% of the world’s children (UNESCO, 2022) and the pandemic plunged an additional 150 million children into absolute poverty (UNICEF, 2021). Systematic reviews demonstrated an increase in the prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms compared to pre-pandemic levels (Panchal et al., 2021; Samji et al., 2021) and concerns were expressed about the suppression of children’s rights because of lockdowns (Munir, 2021). School closures were accompanied by a rapid shift to online learning in many parts of the world (Svaleryd & Vlachos, 2022), and children experienced increased restrictions on their movement and therefore a further intensification of engaging with friends and undertaking leisure online where that was possible, resulting in more time with family at home (see Stoecklin et al., 2021). The broad sweep of these changes demonstrates the global dimensions childhood, with children around the world influenced similarly in many ways because of their position in the generational order. However, the effect of the pandemic impacted the world’s poorest and disadvantaged children disproportionately. The rate of Covid-19-related paediatric fatalities was higher in low and middle-income countries (Kitano et al., 2021), and access to remote learning during the height of the pandemic was most limited in Africa and South Asia, meaning that education was entirely compromised for many of the world’s poorest children, who also experienced an increase in malnutrition during the pandemic (UNICEF Data Hub, 2022). Moreover, children’s experiences of the pandemic were highly dependent on national and local policies, and thus were subject to nation-state responses, in similar ways to adults.

These commonalities and inequalities demonstrate not only the context dependency of experiences of the pandemic, but also the contextuality of childhood. The contributions to this special issue start from these two premises, and document children’s experiences of the pandemic, and by so doing identify the impacts of the pandemic within the context of children’s daily lives, from their perspectives. Thus, this special issue demonstrates the value of obtaining children’s perspectives for providing different knowledge, embedded in local contexts and foregrounding children’s experiences. Therefore, this special issue also serves as a case study for what we can learn through considered social scientific engagement with what children tell us about their experiences. It is not only about hearing what children have to say, but as social scientists using the tools at our disposal to identify underlying patterns in the data which children have provided us, to point out the new and unexpected, and where relevant, having the courage to demonstrate how what is said contradicts or challenges dominant discourses and knowledge about children and childhood. As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, when listened to carefully and analysed judiciously, what children tell us about their well-being presented new insights which often challenged what was emerging as dominant discourses about children and their experience of the pandemic, both in the public sphere and in academic research (see the commentary by Stoecklin on this issue for an insightful summary of these ‘contra’ findings).

It is worth considering these public and academic discourses, not only to set the scene for this special issue, but also to provide the necessary context for why we believed the special issue was needed.

In the public discussion, children were at first not a focus, given the danger of serious illness and death the virus posed, especially to older people and those with underlying health conditions (Andresen et al., 2020; Budde & Lengyel, 2022). While children are often used as a political object of concern because of their vulnerability, often as a political Trojan horse, the ‘children first’ discourse which has been a conventional trope of much crisis-driven and wedge politics — what Scheper-Hughes and Sargent (1998) describe as the ‘cultural politics of childhood’Footnote 1 — did not drive the response to COVID-19 initially. Concern for the well-being and survival of the older generation was the initial focus, appealing to both the existential vulnerabilities of older people and social and civic responsibility of younger people, including children and young people, to do the right thing by complying with public health orders. The initial response was also overwhelmingly a medical and virologic response as governments and supranational organisations tried to come to terms with the virus, what dangers it posed and how it could be controlled. The race to develop a vaccine response occurred largely in lock-step with the political response, which varied dramatically in extensiveness and rapidity. Policy responses ranged from denial and the encouragement of herd immunity to extensive closures of borders and lockdowns (see OECD, 2022). As Zinn notes, many Western industrialised nations responded slowly, being underprepared and starting from a policy framework based on disease containment and the isolation of infected individuals. This contrasted to more robust, rapid and extensive public health responses in places like Taiwan who had learned from their experience of managing the SARS pandemic in 2003 (Zinn, 2021).

What interests us here is the impact of this framing for intergenerational relations. It is within this context of a race against the virus and the vulnerability of older people, that we see the recasting of the needs of younger generations, and the initial public health response helps us understand some of the fault lines that emerged in response to subsequent lockdowns, including closure of schools. These fault lines have included public debate about the social and economic costs and effects of the measures taken to combat the pandemic, some of which has been fuelled by misinformation and disinformation (see van der Zwet et al., 2022 for an overview). While children have been used as a political weapon in these debates, especially around the effects of school closures, this concern for children’s futures does not feature in other areas where children and young people have called out intergenerational injustices, such as climate change, of their declining quality of life compared to previous generations, or the larger political-economic effects of population ageing. These debates have instead revolved around the appropriateness of children acting as political subjects. Social movements of children and young people, whether they be the Fridays for Future Movement, or Extinction Rebellion, have been highly divisive, not only because of the issues they have raised or the tactics they have used, but because of their mere existence as political movements. This is exemplified in the hostility received by young climate leaders such as Greta Thunberg, who had to invert the politics of intergenerational relations, claiming a child-like status, to illustrate the failure of world leaders to tackle climate change (Mason et al., 2023; Stoecklin, 2021). We might conclude therefore that while children and young people were called upon to act responsibility during the pandemic as an act of generational solidarity, children and young people’s political mobilisation has been less welcomed when it is driven by them and about their concerns.

Despite this initial response, more conventional risk and vulnerability responses emerged regarding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children. With unprecedented closures of schools, many global NGOs outlined their concerns about a lost generation of children whose life prospects were to be disrupted in the long term (UNESCO, 2022). Yet, the speed in which schooling and education became a domestic responsibility suggests some deeper social implications. The reliance on the intimate sphere of the home as the platform for a very public activity — the education of children — demonstrates an unprecedented capacity to privatise public responsibilities and, as well as school closures, what was perhaps also unprecedented was the degree to which households were able to take on the demands of public education within their spaces and routines (see Thorell et al., 2021). This reliance upon households also demonstrates the capacity for resilience by much of the population, especially by teachers, who had to transform their teaching practices overnight; by parents, who if not finding themselves in the teaching role were likely to find themselves in the role of managing the routine of the school day; and by children themselves. As a measure of this resilience, it appears that in subsequent lockdowns the increased preparedness and capacities of schools, parents and children seem to have moderated the impacts of school closures (Segers et al., 2023). What has emerged in the research is that while the lockdowns disrupted education in an unprecedented manner, the degree of impact on children may be not so much generational, but mediated by other social, political and economic inequalities (see Champeaux et al., 2023; Hammerstein et al., 2021).

While concerns about school closures were framed in terms of the longer-term impacts on children (on their ‘well-becoming’), another dimension emerged which related to children’s well-being, and that was the impact of COVID-related lockdowns on children’s mental health. There is much to unpack from the large number of studies that have examined the impacts of the pandemic on children’s mental health; however, what is clear is that there has been far less public concern about and academic analysis of children’s ‘well-being’, as we associate that term with adults — that is well-being as flourishing and the capacity to lead a good and meaningful life (see, for example, Baumeister & Vohs, 2002). Like much of the academic literature on child well-being, ‘wellbeing’ was read narrowly, in terms of prevalence of mental illness, exposure to violence, and physical degradation (see, for example, Hawke et al., 2020; Lawson et al., 2020; Prime et al., 2020; Spiteri, 2021). This ignores broader academic discussions and traditions that have demonstrated that well-being is not the inverse of pathology or deficit, but of being well, and of living life well. The point we wish to emphasise here is that very few studies systematically examined the relationship between COVID-19 and children’s well-being in this more complex manner (for an exception, see Savahl et al., 2022) and nor was this reflected in the public discussion, which largely ignored the range of experiences associated with closures, with an overwhelming emphasis on the negative effects on children. While the initial response appealed to intergenerational solidarity, subsequent public discussion of children during the pandemic did not, reverting to more conventional discussions of children’s vulnerability, with few discussions about how children, and their families, managed to get by during the pandemic.

This special issue focuses on children’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the authors contributing to this special issue, the question of how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced children is an empirical one, starting from few premises about what these effects might be. While acknowledging the magnitude of the change and the disruptions of these changes, this empirical neutrality was achieved methodologically by asking children about the impacts of the pandemic on their lives. By bringing together researchers engaged in studying children’s understandings of well-being, this special issue presents children’s perspectives on issues which were the focus of public deliberation, deliberations which children were largely excluded from — including the relationship between COVID-19-related responses and family relationships, intimacy, intergenerational life, risk and vulnerability, and resilience. The contributions therefore examine the social, psychological and material realities experienced by children of the pandemic, specifically:

  • How children experienced the COVID-19 pandemic as a crisis, that is what elements of the pandemic they experienced or perceived as a negative change, danger, or threat? What calls for action did they make and who did they see as responsible for making these changes? Which strategies did they develop to deal with the pandemic and what are the implications of these strategies for generational relations?

Here, our heuristic reference point is crisis-theoretical approaches which argue that modernity is characterised by crises at social, political, historical, and economic levels, which together pose universal, generalised and increasingly threatening dangers (e.g.Beck, 1992; Koselleck, 2000).

  • What are children’s perspectives on and assessments of pre-COVID-19 orthodoxies and normalities, what changed for them regarding the everyday norms of life during the pandemic and what do they see as needing to change in the future? How are old and new normalities constructed and which continuities are emphasised?

Here our heuristic reference point is theories of norms that understand everyday life and ‘normality’ as a social and discursive construction, which is dynamic and is constantly produced (e.g. Foucault, 1977; Goffman, 1959; Link, 2004).

  • What do children tell us about their well-being during the pandemic? What advantages and disadvantages for their well-being do they associate with changes to their lives during COVID-19 and what structural aspects of well-being can be reconstructed from children’s discussions about their well-being during this time.

Here our heuristic reference point is approaches that understand well-being as culturally embedded and socially constructed, and how ‘well’ and ‘being’ are conceptualised and experienced (Kitayama & Markus, 2000; Weisner, 2014).

By interpreting the contributions around these three heuristic reference points, the articles in this special issue contribute to an analysis of experiences of crisis related to the COVID-19 pandemic that allows for a range of experiences of the pandemic to be documented, which may include, but is not limited to, the harms caused by living through COVID-19. As a result, the contributions provide new insights into children and young people’s experiences of the pandemic, experiences that changed their perspectives on themselves and the world, insights which provide us as researchers, policy-makers and an interested public with cause to reflect on our values and our expectations of the role of social institutions.

The common background of all the contributions to this special issue is that they have all been undertaken as part of a larger research project, the Children’s Understandings of Wellbeing: Global and Local Contexts (CUWB) project. The CUWB project examines how children conceptualise and experience well-being from a comparative and global perspective (Fattore et al., 2021). The study aims to interrogate from children’s perspectives the meanings of well-being and how children experience and conceptualise dimensions of well-being. Research undertaken as part of this network shares a number of common principles:

  • The projects take a child-centred approach, in that children are the primary subjects of the research, and it is their perspectives and experiences, obtained by directly involving them in the research, that are the focus. Specifically, children are not asked to respond to questions with closed categories, which characterises quantitative research where children are participants, but involves methodologies which are dialogic and interpretive and which allow children’s own interpretations and experiences to emerge in the research. It is for this reason that many of the findings presented in this special issue present findings that are different to the prevailing orthodoxy of children’s experiences of the pandemic.

  • Related to this, the research uses qualitative methods. Most research on quality of life uses psychometric and standardised measures of well-being, which is useful for determining prevalence of well-being generally, its variation across populations and mediating factors for well-being. As valuable as these studies are, they are restricted to certain constructs of well-being and limited by the format of their measures. The use of multiple kinds of qualitative measures by researchers involved in the CUWB network means that a wide range of dimensions of a phenomenon, in this case children’s experiences of COVID-19, are captured, including those that might not be operationalised in standardised quantitative measures. One advantage of qualitative approaches therefore is to contribute to theoretical development of a concept. This kind of research can also contribute to complex causative understanding of an issue, by seeing causation as the interrelationship of multiple, non-linear and sometimes contradictory factors that are involved in a situation (Tracy, 2010).

  • The research is sensitive to context, not only in the qualitative research sense, in that research occurs in the everyday settings of the participants (as opposed to, for example, experiments, whose success is largely dependent on controlling context), but also that the research is undertaken by those who have knowledge of the broader local context in which they are undertaking their research. Therefore, rather than using standard measures which allow direct comparability, the study explores the importance of local, regional, national and translocal contexts and comparison is not only at the level of data, but involves comparing what aspects of the context in which the research is undertaken are relevant for the specific findings. This embrace of contextual contingency is vital for understanding the different findings presented in this special issue, as their experiences are not only related to their specific social position (e.g. class, gender, cultural background), but also the specific public reception and policy response to COVID-19 in the different countries in which the research was undertaken.

At the time  of writing this introduction, researchers in 29 countries from Africa, South America, Central America, North America, Australia, the UK, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia are involved in the network. By bringing together established qualitative researchers from this CUWB project engaged in studying children’s understandings of well-being, this special issue offers perspectives from across the globe to advance theoretical and empirical insights into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children’s own understandings of well-being.

Benninger, Schmidt-Sane and Hajski (‘Youth Lens: Youth Perspectives on the COVID-19 Pandemic and its impact on well-being in an urban community’) start with the observation that the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly altered the lives of children and youth throughout the world, with significant implications for their long-term health and well-being. They observe that children were largely excluded from the development and implementation of the various pandemic mitigation strategies and policies, yet their lives were significantly affected by these changes. They go some way to rectifying this issue through their own research, which sheds light on children’s perspectives and experiences during the pandemic and the various ways it impacted their health and well-being, along with the resources which allowed them to continue to flourish in the face of extreme hardship. Based on the Youth Lens study, with 65 children and young people (aged 9–18 years) from urban communities in Cleveland, OH, which uses a participatory methodology, they highlight several important findings. In discussing elements of physical health, subjective experiences of safety and capacities for resilience, their participants emphasise the ambivalence of living in crisis, of concern and coping, of anxiety and decline in some aspects of life and opportunities to flourish in others. A novel and important element of their study is that they asked their participants to describe the strategies that they found helpful to deal with their challenging circumstances. The authors systematically analyse these findings to develop a suite of recommendations that promote well-being, which complement those addressing the increased prevalence of acute mental health issues in children associated with the pandemic.

Fattore and colleagues (‘Disruption, Slowness and Collective Effervescence: Children’s Perspectives on COVID-19 Lockdowns’) also start from the premise that children’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic is as a crisis, but focus on the epistemic quality of these experiences by asking children to provide their perspectives on the lockdowns. Based on in-depth and extended discussions with a small number of children and young people, about their experiences of well-being before the pandemic, during lockdowns and post-COVID-19 lockdowns, children described in detail what their daily experiences of the pandemic were, what aspects of life changed as a result of COVID-19 restrictions and what aspects of living through the pandemic they would like to see continue post-lockdown, in a ‘COVID-19 normal’ world. Their responses challenge more extreme fatalistic depictions of lockdowns, including that they associated some aspects of the lockdown experience with living a ‘good life’ (Andresen et al., 2011). This included descriptions of how they developed new rituals and practices around time-use, such as new routines guiding their daily habits. Children described these new ways of managing time as task-based rather than rule-based, with children experiencing slowness and greater control over their time. They also found that lockdowns provided a possibility for children to assert a public agency through banal acts of sociability, for example by conforming to public health measures such as mask-wearing and hand-washing. While small acts, children discussed these in terms of acting as moral agents (protecting the safety of others) and as part of a larger civic attitude they observed around them. Thus, their acts can be seen as expressions of larger forms of social solidarity that contributed to a sense of collective effervescence.

A similar approach is taken by Fegter and Kost (‘Visibility and Well-being in School Environments: Children’s Reflections on ‘the New Normal’ of Teaching and Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic’) who aim to contribute to theoretical concepts of school-related well-being that focuses on children’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. They argue that, despite schooling being one of the dominant aspects of children’s lives and a defining feature of childhood in many contexts, still only a few studies reconstruct school well-being from children’s perspectives. They use the experience of the pandemic as an important opportunity to rectify this situation, demonstrating that children’s experiences of different school practices during the pandemic provide a rare epistemic opportunity to investigate structural features of school environments that children construct as relevant to their well-being. By drawing from online interviews with 11- to 14-year-old children from Berlin, conducted during the Spring of 2021 during one of the phases of school lockdowns, Fegter and Kost’s discourse analytical approach demonstrates how children construct visibility as a central aspect of well-being in school environments that is relevant for their sense of agency, security, and self and for feeling well. They demonstrate how children construct visibility in school as a medium of control that subjects their bodies to the norms of the school, which exposes the individual to the gaze of others, but also provides security in the context of the digital sphere and its temptations. One implication they draw from their analysis is that these assessments of digital learning arrangements enforced by pandemic-related school closures should be considered when developing theoretical concepts or undertaking research on school-related well-being more generally.

Müderrisoğlu and colleagues (‘Experiences of Children During the Pandemic: Scrutinizing Increased Vulnerabilities in Education in the Case of Turkey’) also take as their specific focus children and young people’s experiences of school closures. Based on qualitative fieldwork carried out with 59 children during the summer of 2020 in Istanbul, Turkey, they demonstrate that there were specific vulnerabilities children experienced associated with their generational positioning, especially around mobility. However, different vulnerabilities were experienced by children according to their socio-economic status, further entrenching existing inequalities based on their class position. They reconstruct from children’s discussions these inequalities, which they demonstrate are especially pronounced in terms of distance learning and access to digital media. While Müderrisoğlu and colleagues focus on inequalities in their article, they also elaborate on the special quality of school as a relational space — for interactive learning, socialisation with their peers, and solidaristic relations with their teachers — which, from their participants’ perspective, constitutes the special value of school.

Gervais et al. also describe the factors that explain different experiences for children of the pandemic. Using a novel longitudinal mixed-method design, they track the experiences of 149 young people from Quebec over the course of two lockdowns. They track their participants’ well-being, measured using standard quality of life scales, noting that on these measures there are three distinct groups of young people: those with ‘worrisome well-being’; those with ‘average well-being’ and those with ‘high well-being’. Their qualitative work helps make sense of these differences by focusing on what young people prioritised as factors that were favourable or unfavourable to their well-being. The authors identify and distinguish two configurations of interactions between children and their environment over the first year of the pandemic that help to explain the differences in subjective well-being. They highlight the importance of digitally assisted activities, relationships and support, which enabled one group to maintain friendships and relationships during school lockdowns and discuss interventions and social measures to better support children’s well-being, based on these experiences.

Hampton and McAuley (‘The Impact of COVID‑19 on Well‑Being: Welsh Children’s Perspectives’) engage with age-related disparities in their study of the effects of COVID-19 and related lockdowns on Welsh children’s subjective well-being. Drawing on a study of 727 children, 293 in primary school and 434 in secondary school, as part of the Children’s Worlds multinational study of children’s subjective well-being, Hampton and McAuley provide a comparison of children’s lives prior to the onset of the pandemic with their lives during the pandemic, based on children’s assessments. A number of life domains are analysed and a complex picture emerges. Children were increasingly dissatisfied with education and Hampton and McAuley point out the relevance of pre-existing education policy and reform in Wales, to help understand this dissatisfaction. While there was increased dissatisfaction in some domains, the drastic changes brought on by the pandemic led to self-assessed improvements in other areas, including in relationships with family and, for younger participants, in their relationships with friends. However, older participants (those in secondary school) were overall less positive than younger participants. This finding is consistent with the findings of subjective well-being surveys, which find a decline in subjective well-being around the time children commence secondary school (Rees, 2019; Savahl et al., 2022). It is still unclear why this is the case, but it does suggest that children’s experience of the pandemic must take into account underlying structural factors, including the relationship between age-related development and how individuals navigate changes in their social position, as they transition from childhood to youth.

The importance of digital infrastructures for maintaining relationships as a key factor for children’s well-being during the pandemic is also the focus of Sandhu and Barn’s research. In their article (‘“The internet is keeping me from dying from boredom”: Understanding the management and social construction of the self through middle-class Indian children’s engagement with digital technologies during the COVID-19 lockdown’), they explore how the experiences of urban middle-class children were mediated by digital technologies during the COVID-19 national lockdown in India. They argue that access to the internet became increasingly important to manage prosaic daily routines during the lockdown, deploying the ‘affordances of digital technologies’. Based on semi-structured interviews and mapping exercises with 16- to 17-year-old urban middle-class young people, Sandhu and Barn challenge dominant depictions of young people’s use of digital technologies which focus on social anxieties, by studying how young people negotiated risks and sought digital opportunities in the management and social construction of the self. In doing so, they demonstrate that children are reflexive users of digital technologies, and, by outlining how these strategies of the self play out within the discourse of pedagogised middle-class childhood in India, contribute to our understanding of the relationship between social structure, self-structure, and individual choices, with implications for child well-being, and the reproduction of social inequality in society.

Newland, Mourlam and Strouse (‘Rural Children’s Well-Being in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic: Perspectives from Children in the Midwestern U.S.’) focus on a different social parameter — children living in rural areas in Midwestern United States, a context in which children are more likely to be exposed to a variety of risk factors to their well-being in general. Based on interviews with 72 children and young people aged 8 to 18, their findings demonstrate a notable gap between the public discourse on children’s well-being during the pandemic and children’s own assessments. Most children described only limited impacts on their well-being, including challenges at home and school, and maintaining peer relationships as a result of COVID-19. However, Newland and colleagues sensitively outline how their participants developed creative and useful strategies to minimise the impact on their well-being. These included emotion management. When asked to describe the impacts of COVID-19 on them, children described a complex range of emotions, which were more broad ranging than what is often included in standard psychometric measures. These complex emotions were understood by the children as ways they would adapt and cope to the challenging situation they were living in, something that is far less acknowledged in the research on children and COVID-19. By taking a phenomenological approach, Newland and colleagues present a more nuanced depiction of children’s experiences of the pandemic without overlooking the disruption to children’s lives that occurred, including a disruption in what it means to be safe. They argue that it was less the subjective sense of safety that changed for the children in their sample but their concept of safety that changed. The children defined safety in terms that surpassed adult notions of physical and emotional safety in their homes, neighbourhoods, and schools and instead focused on safety precautions to protect their health and the health of others, thus re-conceptualising their sense of self as moral and civic actors.