Q&A: Lessons the Pandemic Is Still Teaching About Children's Wellbeing

With new grant funding, a team of researchers was all set to begin home visits and classroom observations. They were eager to better understand the connections between maternal education and children’s health and wellbeing.

And then the pandemic hit.

“Obviously, we weren’t able to do any of those things,” said Turnbull, who conducts research at the UVA School of Education and Human Development Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning.

What the multidisciplinary team from the School of Education, the UVA School of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine, and WashU Medicine were able to do instead was capture the experiences of mothers and kindergarteners during the 2020-21 school year. Though that year was unlike any other school year in recent history, what they learned can provide insights for how we can improve outcomes for children in the future.

We sat down with Turnbull to learn more.

Q: What exactly is the relationship between maternal educational levels and children’s health and wellbeing?

Higher maternal education is consistently associated with multiple positive health-promoting practices, like not smoking, and parenting practices, like educational involvement. These practices are, in turn, associated with early childhood health and wellbeing, as well as children’s academic success.

However, we recognize that maternal education isn’t a direct cause of child health and wellbeing, instead it is the presence of multiple factors. And, even if it were a direct cause of child health and wellbeing, maternal educational attainment isn’t something we can change easily. So, it is important we try to understand more of what is actually happening.

Q: How did the pandemic create a unique opportunity to better understand the connections between maternal education and children’s health and wellbeing?

There is growing evidence that correlating factors of maternal education, such as parenting practices and household routines, may help explain why maternal education is so strongly related to child health and wellbeing.

With childcare and schooling disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic continuing during the 2020-21 school year, we suspected existing correlating factors of maternal education would be magnified. We decided to interview mothers to learn more about their children’s schooling experiences and wellbeing during this time.

Mothers shared stories of both positive and negative impacts on their child’s mental health, their relationships with other children and adults, and their learning and development.

Mothers also shared their perspectives about resources or supports that they viewed to be helpful in reducing the impact of disruptions on their child’s learning and development.

Q: What did your research uncover about the mental health of the kindergarteners and how can we use those lessons now?

Struggles with mental health do not necessarily show up during adolescence. The mothers in our study shared seeing these struggles in their kindergarteners.

Many mothers in our study reported their child missed opportunities to create or maintain friendships during their kindergarten year or that their social skills diminished noticeably. Mothers also described negative impacts to their child’s engagement in school activities, rule-following at home, and emotional reactivity, as well as symptoms of anxiety or depression.

Although we tend to think of young children as resilient, we still need to be proactive about promoting their mental health. In the home, this could include making time and space to connect through daily routines, like reading aloud, and through promoting positive peer play. In school settings, we should be screening all children’s mental health regularly and prioritizing collaborations between families, early childhood education professionals, and mental health consultants to provide support.

Q: You also looked at learning impacts. What did you find that can be useful as we consider ways to improve student outcomes?

We found that the majority of moms were struggling to provide both financial support through paid work and education support for their children.

Importantly, the mothers who reported the most positive kindergarten experiences for their child were those who had access to financial supports, like government assistance or paid time off, work flexibilities, such as working from home, or social supports, such as a grandparent or another family member, so their child could engage in one-on-one learning.

Although we know high-quality, high-intensity small group instruction and tutoring programs can be expensive, we should consider and continue to measure the return on investment in children’s education outcomes.

We also learned that keeping lines of communication open between schools and home really mattered to moms. Mothers in our study who reported that their child was thriving in kindergarten often described frequent back-and-forth communication about their child’s learning with their teacher as a key factor.