Young Children’s Concepts of Good and Evil before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Qualitative Research Study

Dana Hanesová

doi:10.3390/rel12090714

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine changes in 6–8-year-old children’s concepts of good and evil, indicating some shifts in their religious and spiritual development due to closing schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Slovakia, religious education (RE) was one of the most neglected school subjects during the pandemic. Almost 300 children were asked to project their associations with good and evil either visually or verbally. This procedure was used several times before 2017 and after the first and second pandemic waves. The content of the children’s associations from all three periods was analyzed, categorized, quantitatively summarized, and compared. The numbers of children’s associations of good and evil with supernatural beings, religious rituals, and personal faith during the pandemic were reduced several times in comparison with 2017. The numbers of associations of good and evil with interpersonal relationships, inner human qualities and nature increased. The virus appeared as a concept of evil only in the second wave of the pandemic. The results point to a weakened intensity of children’s use of religious language and their religious development in the period 2020–2021, which might be one of the consequences of the limited teaching of RE during the pandemic.

Highlights

This study focuses on whether—and in which direction—children’s perceptions of the basic human value of good and of its counterpart evil changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools closed for public health reasons
Given the goal of the research, it was important to evaluate the dimension of flexibility, i.e., what different clusters of associations with the terms good and evil were represented by the children
In the case of the concept ‘good’, this decline was most evident with the 1st grades, where the 41% ratio of all pre-COVID-19 association with supernatural word fell to 0% in the 1st wave, and to 8% in the second wave

Summary

Introduction

This study focuses on whether—and in which direction—children’s perceptions of the basic human value of good and of its counterpart evil changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools closed for public health reasons. Religious education (RE) and ethical education (EE) in Slovakia, as well as in several other countries with a confessional type of RE, were among subjects most limited by the changes necessitated by the pandemic. In these countries, both RE and EE are important agents for the development of children’s morality and religiosity, and to some extent of their spirituality in the school context. This raises another serious question—has limited RE over several months due to the pandemic had a negative effect upon the moral, religious and spiritual development of young children? In addition to the interrupted teaching of RE, other important factors that might have had a negative effect on children’s religious and spiritual development need to considered, e.g., closed churches and places of worship, restricted living space, increased stress and tension in relationships, complicated family situations, especially where a parent was employed in the critical infrastructure and there were problems related to taking care of children

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion