Abstract
COVID-19, a new emerging infectious disease (EID), has spread throughout the world, including Europe. Spain, in particular, has witnessed a significant outbreak of the pandemic. All classes have been canceled, and the government has declared a state of emergency, ordering the lockdown and confinement of the entire population. All children in the country have been confined to their homes since March 13 and are not allowed to leave at any time. This population is thus facing the harshest restrictions. Given the vulnerable situation of children, the aim of this research is to understand how they represent and emotionally cope with the COVID-19 crisis. A free association exercise elicited by the word “coronavirus” was completed by 228 children (age range: 3–12 years) from the North of Spain. To analyze the content, we employed the Reinert method with Iramuteq software for lexical analysis. The results revealed that children represent the COVID-19 as an enemy that is being fought by the doctors. Children are afraid and worried about catching the virus, but mainly because they think they can infect their grandparents, and this makes them feel guilty. Moreover, the lockdown situation has produced conflicting emotions in the children. On the one hand, they are scared, nervous, lonely, sad, bored, and angry, but they also feel safe, calm, and happy with their families. These results indicate the need for governments to also consider children in their management of the current situation by placing greater emphasis on social and inclusive policies to help alleviate the possible effects that they may suffer as a consequence of the pandemic and the lockdown. In short, there is a need to address the psychological, educational, social, health, and well-being needs of children.
Highlights
Children represent only a small percentage of COVID-19 cases (Hamzelou, 2020; Pavone et al, 2020), and the majority of infected children might appear asymptomatic (Cai et al, 2020) or present mild clinical manifestations (Jiao et al, 2020)
The analysis identified the main ideas held by children regarding COVID-19, elicited through the free association procedure
The first main cluster is composed of Classes 3 (Our enemy the virus) and 2 (Fear of coronavirus)
Summary
Children represent only a small percentage of COVID-19 cases (Hamzelou, 2020; Pavone et al, 2020), and the majority of infected children might appear asymptomatic (Cai et al, 2020) or present mild clinical manifestations (Jiao et al, 2020). In most countries of the world, schools have been closed (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2020) with children confined to their homes. Cases began to multiply exponentially and uncontrollably in early March. In view of this situation, all the schools in the country were closed (Sánchez, 2020a), with the Spanish prime minister declaring a state of emergency on 14th March 2020, ordering a mandatory lockdown for all citizens (Royal Decree 462/2020, 2020). The prime minister stated that the rules of this lockdown were very drastic, possibly the most stringent in Europe and even the world (Merino, 2020; Sánchez, 2020b)
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