Abstract
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has spread rapidly throughout the world and has had a long-term impact. The pandemic has caused great harm to society and caused serious psychological trauma to many people. Children are a vulnerable group in this global public health emergency, as their nervous systems, endocrine systems, and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes are not well developed. Psychological crises often cause children to produce feelings of abandonment, despair, incapacity, and exhaustion, and even raise the risk of suicide. Children with mental illnesses are especially vulnerable during the quarantine and social distancing period. The inclusion of psychosocial support for children and their families are part of the health responses to disaster and disaster recovery. Based on the biopsychosocial model, some children may have catastrophic thoughts and be prone to experience despair, numbness, flashbacks, and other serious emotional and behavioral reactions. In severe cases, there may be symptoms of psychosis or posttraumatic stress disorder. Timely and appropriate protections are needed to prevent the occurrence of psychological and behavioral problems. The emerging digital applications and health services such as telehealth, social media, mobile health, and remote interactive online education are able to bridge the social distance and support mental and behavioral health for children. Based on the psychological development characteristics of children, this study also illustrates interventions on the psychological impact from the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the world has been struggling to curb the influences of the pandemic, the quarantine and social distancing policies will have long-term impacts on children. Innovative digital solutions and informatics tools are needed more than ever to mitigate the negative consequences on children. Health care delivery and services should envision and implement innovative paradigms to meet broad well-being needs and child health as the quarantine and social distancing over a longer term becomes a new reality. Future research on children's mental and behavioral health should pay more attention to novel solutions that incorporate cutting edge interactive technologies and digital approaches, leveraging considerable advances in pervasive and ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, and health informatics among many others. Digital approaches, health technologies, and informatics are supposed to be designed and implemented to support public health surveillance and critical responses to children’s growth and development. For instance, human-computer interactions, augmented reality, and virtual reality could be incorporated to remote psychological supporting service for children’s health; mobile technologies could be used to monitor children’s mental and behavioral health while protecting their individual privacy; big data and artificial intelligence could be used to support decision making on whether children should go out for physical activities and whether schools should be reopened. Implications to clinical practices, psychological therapeutic practices, and future research directions to address current effort gaps are highlighted in this study.
Highlights
Due to the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), people in many counties such as the United States, China, and Italy are restricted from leaving homes for anything other than essential activities [1,2,3,4]
Longer duration of home confinement may result in poor mental health and avoidance behaviors [5]
Parents and families should take more care of children’s mental health in their early life pathways, as good educational strategies are important during the COVID-19 pandemic
Summary
Due to the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), people in many counties such as the United States, China, and Italy are restricted from leaving homes for anything other than essential activities [1,2,3,4]. The narrowed scope of cognitive ability may cause children to just focus on pandemic situations, disease, and other related negative contents, and no longer care about other positive things in the surrounding environment They are likely to pay more attention to negative consequences or bad news. On the other hand, staying at home instead becomes a wonderful opportunity to strengthen parent-child relationships, facilitating children to actively participate in housework and improve abilities to take care of themselves During this special period, many parents are prone to emotional instability and some of them even have quarrels and conflicts. Children could listen to music to promote wellness and manage stress, since this evidence-based intervention has been shown to improve emotional, cognitive, and communicative health and quality of life [51,52]. EFT could consolidate the security gained through these new patterns of connection and restructure family’s interactions [54]
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