COVID schools lockdown dealt parents mental health blow

It was the great year of disruption, change and adaptation. COVID-19 brought home a new, mysterious unknown in people’s lives – illness and death, lockdowns and economic shocks, and a long-term bid to recover from the shutdown of trusted supply chains and office work. Today, a hybrid world of online home-work and remote exchanges survives, a legacy of a global pandemic made only possible by the power of the internet.

But two years later, those whose lives were upended by this great disruption are starting to reconcile the toll of personal change. Children whose primary school years were shut down and forced to converse online with a teacher in a cacophonous Teams meeting, will suffer the most from losing a formative year of schooling; likewise, their teachers have had to adapt themselves to cumbersome ways of teaching and assessing. And now, new research shows that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic greatly affected parents as well.

At least one in five parents – 20.6% – experienced mental health issues because of the new demands and changes in their children’s schooling arrangements and their own work realities in 2021.

While in 2020, only 6.2% of the parents reported that they were able to make time for themselves to rest, in 2021 this increased to 37.5%, perhaps reflecting the need of parents to destress from feeling overwhelmed and stressed with work, helping their children to follow online learning and family.

These are the findings from the COVID-19 and Education Malta (Cov-EM) research project, carried out by the Early Childhood and Primary Education (ECPE) Research Group within the Faculty of Education, University of Malta, where a group of female academics sought to document and explore what can be learned from the insights of different stakeholders in Early and Primary Education during the COVID-19 pandemic in Malta.

“COVID-19 laid bare some of the difficulties that families face on a daily basis in their attempt to juggle personal, family and work-related tasks at once. With the private sphere of the family seriously challenged by the general expectation that families are permanently connected, the authors of this study threw further light on the impact of diminishing private space and time on the families’ mental wellbeing,” said Prof. Carmel Borg, head of department in Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education at the Faculty of Education.

“Of significance is the statistic that more than 50% of the participating parents felt ‘stressed-out’ and ‘out-of-control’. This is a worrying datum, given that children’s holistic development is heavily dependent on emotionally positive contexts. International research analysing the state of mental health of parents during the pandemic correlates parental stress and anxiety with an array of issues, ranging from children’s psychological problems to harsh parenting.”

The report was carried out by Josephine Deguara, Charmaine Bonello, Rosienne Camilleri, Josephine Milton, and Tania Muscat, all lecturers in early childhood and primary education. With the gamut of experiences presented in five individual reports clearly showing the way children’s education was upended by the removal of physical learning, the findings however reveal a general shift in sentiment from the pandemic year of 2020 to that of 2021, when a full 12 months of partial lockdowns and restrictions had been clocked.

Long-term disruption

Today, a hybrid world of online home-work and remote exchanges survives, a legacy of a global pandemic made only possible by the power of the internet

Crucially, the drastic changes in two surveys over the 2020 and 2021 experiences indicate that while disruption in the pandemic year was met unquestioningly, that sentiment changed a year later when vaccinations started being made available with a slow return to normality.

For example, in September 2020 (Survey 1) 68% of parents felt confident supporting their children with online technology, even when they had to learn how to navigate online domains. But in a second survey in September 2021, this dropped considerably to 36.1%, suggesting that in the second lockdown, schools were using more varied online modes of online teaching than before. 

The radical change in sentiment is further attested to findings that 57.2% of parents in Survey 1 claimed that they found support from the school with respect to their child’s learning, but then this decreased to just 2.1% in Survey 2, “reflecting the level of helplessness and abandonment parents repeatedly highlighted in 2021.”

Parents learnt quickly about the many distractions at home in 2020 (58.7%) which were not helping their children to focus – video games, constant TV and YouTube screening are often complained-about culprits – but this decreased to 37.8% in 2021, possibly showing that some parents tried to address this issue. 

A positive finding was that most parents (66.4% in 2020 and then 78% in 2021) supported their children in online activities, and that even more (76.3% in Survey 1 and 84.5% in Survey 2) spent more time helping their children with their work and explaining concepts to their children.

But on the negative side, 54.5% of the parents claimed that they ‘felt stressed and out-of-control’; which increased to 69.8% 2021. “The reason for such an increase could be that parents were feeling tired and stressed with continuously supporting their children with online teaching and over a long time. At the time of the second survey, the novelty of online learning had worn out and keeping children engaged for long hours in front of a screen was having its toll on parents,” the authors of the report said.

A silver lining was that in 2020, 66.5% of the parents claimed their relationship with their children improved during COVID-19 as they spent more time together, when compared to their relationship prior to the pandemic. But it is worth mentioning that 12.7% of the parents reported that in the second school lockdown their relationship with their children got worse. “The thread of negative feelings was constant in Run 2,” the authors continue. “While in Run 1 many parents (66.5%) managed to remain meaningfully connected to relatives and friends, in Run 2 this decreased considerably to 21.3%.”

And the level of happiness and satisfaction decreased from 2020 to 2021. While 34.6% of the parents maintained that they felt happier and 37.1% felt more satisfied in Survey 1, these percentages decreased to 28.9% and 22.3% respectively in Survey 2. In fact, in Survey 2, 44.7% claimed that they felt much less happy and 41.2% less satisfied.

Stressless mornings but longer days

As a result of school lockdowns, the majority of parents (72.5%) valued the lack of stress in getting ready for school every morning, and 72.4% valued not having to think what to wear while 69.3% liked spending less time commuting to and from schools. Other parents (61.9%) appreciated not having to worry about going to work if their child was ill while 63.2% appreciated the increase in family time.

However, in Survey 2 in 2021, 58.4% of the parents claimed that they were more stressed during the scholastic year 2020-2021 than in the previous year.

While some parents reported that, likewise, their children felt less stressed to get ready for school and enjoyed more family time, as well as learned to be more independent, on the other hand in 2021, there were also parents who claimed that children found it difficult to understand what was expected of them, and demanded more support from the educators. 

For example, in 2020 parents complained that they were struggling more with finding balance between helping their children with schoolwork and life (56%), a concern that was also voiced in 2021, where however, some parents highlighted their struggle to meet their work commitments while supporting their children. 

“The findings consistently showed that one of the major downfalls of the pandemic was that children missed interacting with their friends considerably,” the authors say.

“In 2020 some parents commented about the stressful situations they were going through and argued that the well-being and mental health of their family members were negatively affected during the pandemic. Some parents were more specific and claimed that they found it stressful to juggle between working online, meeting family needs and supporting their children during online learning.”

Schooling transition

COVID created a new learning reality for children

While the majority of parents did not agree with the children having had their education halted when schools closed, most parents in the 2020 and 2021 surveys said they were satisfied with the way schools shifted teaching and learning to remote modes – from 58.8% of parents showing satisfaction in Survey 1, this increased to 70.4% in Survey 2.

More than half of the parents (55.7% and 62.5%) claimed their children preferred real-time, synchronous online sessions.

Yet parents complained that there was inequity of provision between the three education sectors. 

Parents considered that church and independent schools were more prepared than state schools to shift to online modes of learning and to provide support to children. 

80.2% (in 2020) and 89.6% (in 2021) of the parents claimed that Maths was the most taught subjects in primary classes, while 67.1% and 71.9% claimed that PSCD together with foreign languages (96.5%) was the least taught. Language lessons were also very frequent with English being taught more than Maltese in both surveys. 

Lack of face-to-face interaction, lack of children’s engagement, lack of motivation reduced contact time and lack of support for children were amongst the main concerns of parents during online teaching.

Parents were generally more positive in the second survey about the way schools and educators prepared for remote modes of teaching, the way they managed online learning, and the level of support they provided. 

A new learning reality

Most parents had to make changes to their home environment to create a learning space for their children to follow online activities. Most parents claimed their children had to share their learning space with their sibling or a parent working from home; however, most of these parents stated that in their view, their children had enough personal, undisturbed space to follow online activities or lessons. 

69% of the parents in Survey 1 claimed that their children had to share a computer or laptop; this percentage decreased considerably to 54.8% in Survey 2, indicating that parents were more prepared for the second lockdown and had invested in buying technological equipment for the children to follow online learning.

The pandemic also pushed parents to learn how to access online platforms, Powerpoints and Apps. Children worked with different virtual spaces during online learning. They mainly were exposed to the use of Apps for quizzes, Powerpoints programmes and videoconferencing to learn. Parents mentioned MS Teams and Teleskola as the most common platforms used by children. 

But the majority in 2021 indicated that they preferred to have their children to be in school and learn through the traditional, face-to-face interaction rather than through online means.

“It was interesting to note that in Survey 1, which was still early days in the pandemic, 43% of the parents at the time, preferred a blended approach, where they suggested for learning to be partly carried online and partly face-to face while 35.8% indicated that they would opt for online learning,” the authors said.

Need for equitable solutions

The academics conclude that beyond COVID-19, all schools should get equitable resources and training in digital skills, continuous professional development and support for all educators in all the three sectors of the state, church and independent, that will provide educators with the necessary skills and confidence they need.

“Going forward to post-pandemic times, educators should be provided with the necessary training that will not only help them implement the emergent curriculum or an active pedagogy in class but also, to be able to do so remotely.”

With most parents complaining that online learning was not engaging enough for children, online learning should be used the least time possible and only if and as necessary with young children. More importantly, provisions should be made for children to meet their friends remotely in a social way to make up for lost time.

“Beyond the pandemic, educators and parents should remember the importance of play for children to socially interact with their peers and provide them with more time and space to play with each other to make up for the play lost during the pandemic. Moreover, play-based activities and experiences should be introduced in schools as well as in after school programmes, with immediate effect.”

The authors also said that more effort should have been made to reach out to vulnerable children. “These children should have been contacted and provided with adequate online support, while ensuring that they had basic care. Vulnerable children and their families should be provided with coping strategies to help them get back on track and achieve better outcomes. Furthermore, educators need to be trained in being sensitive to family issues and their socio-economic and cultural background, to understand them and address their pandemic needs better.”

They also said that schools should be providing training for those parents who lack basic literacy skills to be able for them to navigate the internet, communicate with educators, participate in society and employment, as a source of personal enrichment and to be able to support their children.