COVID-19 school and kindergarten closure relates to children's social relationships: a longitudinal study in Japan

Hiromichi Hagihara,Jue Wang,Chifumi Sakata,Ryoichi Watanabe,Yusuke Moriguchi,Nozomi Yamamoto,Xianwei Meng

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-04944-2

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has led children to experience school closures. Although increasing evidence suggests that such intense social quarantine influences children’s social relationships with others, longitudinal studies are limited. Using longitudinal data collected during (T1) and after (T2) intensive school closure and home confinement, this study investigated the impacts of social quarantine on children’s social relationships. Japanese parents of children aged 0–9 years (n = 425) completed an online questionnaire that examined children’s socio-emotional behavior and perceived proximity to parents or others. The results demonstrated that social quarantine was not significantly related to children’s socio-emotional behavior across all age groups. However, changes in children’s perceived proximity varied depending on certain age-related factors: elementary schoolers’ perceived closeness to parents significantly decreased after the reopening of schools, whereas that to others, such as peers, increased. Such effects were not observed in infants and preschoolers. The follow-up survey 9-month after the reopening of schools (T3; n = 130) did not detect significant differences in both children’s socio-emotional behavior and perceived proximity from that after the intense quarantine. These findings suggest that school closure and home confinement may have influenced children’s social development differently across their age, and its effects were larger in perceived closeness rather than social behavior.

Highlights

The COVID-19 pandemic has led children to experience school closures
Leveraging the characteristics of the longitudinal data, this study examined whether children’s social relationships with peers changed after school closure, while children showed both more problems in their peer relationships and more prosocial behavior during such closure compared with before[19]
Since our aim here was to confirm whether children experienced home confinement during T1 and not T2, post hoc tests were conducted with a focus on the single main effects of time in each age group

Summary

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has led children to experience school closures. increasing evidence suggests that such intense social quarantine influences children’s social relationships with others, longitudinal studies are limited. Moriguchi et al.[19] conducted a cross-sectional study on Japanese parents, whose children were aged 4–9 years, to investigate if and how children’s social behaviors before and during the pandemic-led school closure. They found that children experienced more problems in their peer relationships during the outbreak of the disease and, on the contrary, they showed more prosocial behavior during the same period. The COVID-19 pandemic is different from a natural disaster, there would be some similarities in terms of the lack of social relationship with peers

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