The economic impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on family life and children’s eating habits

Abstract

It is no tittle-tattle that the incidence of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world in many areas. Nigeria got her own share of this virus in February 2020, which led to the closure of schools, worship centres, businesses, and other social arenas by the Federal Government. Based on experience and occurrences, we investigated the economic impact of children eating habits during the COVID-19 lockdown in Nigeria. The snowball sampling technique was used to collect data from 334 adults across the nation. Findings revealed that families with an increase or decrease in eating patterns are not likely to support the lockdown policy by the government during COVID-19 compared to families with unchanged eating patterns, among others. Further, families' expenditures change during the COVID-19 lockdown irrespective of their income level. This implies that the pandemic has affected negatively Nigerian parents who have been facing total and partial lockdown with no increase in their income but a decrease in a savings and corresponding increase in their children’s eating rate. We, therefore, recommend that internal institutions oversee the need to have a food reservoir in case of future occurrences of this nature whereby people could have a temporal means of survival. Additionally, parents' coping strategies can be utilised to encourage their children to learn new skills (online skill acquisition training) during the lockdown.