Me, my child and Covid‐19: Parents' reflections on their child's experiences of lockdown in the UK and China

Abstract

AbstractOver the past 2 years, the world has been living through the unprecedented Covid‐19 pandemic. Children have had to adapt to online classrooms and lessons of some sort, and many parents have been forced to work from home while supervising their child's home learning activities. We used participatory visual methods to understand how children and their parents have coped during this time, engaging parents as co‐researchers to ask their child to photograph and/or draw pictures that represent their daily lived experiences over the lockdown period. We then asked parents to interview their children (24 in total, 13 in the UK and 11 in China), using the children's artwork as prompts, and finally we interviewed parents. Through the data collection process, parents captured their children's experiences and feelings since the coronavirus struck. The data was analysed using Foucault's theory of discourse to provide unique and comparative insights into children's experiences in the UK and China during this exceptional time. Ours is the first study to integrate parents' and children's views of Covid‐19, drawing on parents as co‐researchers. We argue that combining the data collection methods and drawing on parents as co‐researchers enabled parents to gain insights into an understanding of their child's lived experiences throughout the pandemic that might otherwise have been unknown. These insights were often unexpected for parents, and have been grouped around themes of parental relief, anxiety and understanding.