Parenting out-of-school children during COVID-19

With 1.37 billion children now out of school – nearly 80% of all enrolled children in the world – parents and carers across the globe are rapidly coming to terms with the challenges of parenting in the time of COVID-19. Parenting is made harder by uncertainty, stress and economic hardship.

Parenting for Lifelong Health and the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents (Accelerate) Hub have produced a set of six one-page tips for parents.

These sheets cover planning one-on-one time, staying positive, creating a daily routine, avoiding bad behaviour, managing stress and talking about COVID-19. They are the result of a partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, the Internet of Good Things, United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USAID and the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children.

Keeping your usual rules and routines in your household is especially important for children right now: it will help them feel safe.

Available from the WHO and UNICEF, the downloadable one-pagers contain great advice condensed from their non-commercial evidence-based parenting programmes and adapted to fit these extraordinary times. Volunteers are translating the sheets into more than 50 languages. These translations are available on covid19parenting.com.

“Keeping your usual rules and routines in your household is especially important for children right now: it will help them feel safe,” says Professor Cathy Ward from the UCT Department of Psychology. “It’ll help the grown-ups, too: we all need to know where we stand, and normal routines are a big help with that.”

Parenting for Lifelong Health is a suite of culturally adaptable, not-for-profit and well-tested parenting programmes for strengthening parent-child relationships and promoting child wellbeing. Developed by researchers from the University of Cape Town (UCT), Stellenbosch University and institutions in the United Kingdom with the WHO, UNICEF and community-based organisations, the programmes are designed to be offered on a large scale in low-resource settings.

The UKRI GCRF Accelerate Hub is led by an interdisciplinary team at Oxford University and UCT, with partners worldwide. It aims to discover the combinations of services that can most efficiently and cost-effectively help adolescents achieve their potential across multiple life domains: health, education, employment and safety.

• Cluver L et al. (2020) Parenting in a time of COVID-19. The Lancet  doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30736-4