Supporting stakeholders' work to turn the tide on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children

Author: Amy Woodhouse, Chief Executive, Parenting across Scotland

Earlier in my career, before Parenting across Scotland and Children in Scotland, I spent 11 years as a mental health researcher. And because of that experience, I feel confident enough to say that we don’t always need new mental health research. Some things have been proven so irrefutably that we don’t need to question them or test them any further.

We know without a shadow of a doubt, for example, that poor mental health and poverty are inextricably linked.  We also know that parental and child mental health are similarly interconnected. And some of the things that promote good mental wellbeing, such as being connected to others or being physically active, are the same for all ages and populations – they are universally good.

What we don’t always know enough about is what the current stressors are for different groups of people or how they receive support.  This is where the CEYRIS research has a vital role to play.

Working for a parenting organisation, I cannot tell you how helpful it is to have up to date evidence about parents and carers’ mental wellbeing. I have poured over the data in Report three, which focuses specifically on the experiences of 4785 parents and carers living across Scotland. And I’ve thought hard about what it all means.

Some things the report tells us are actually pretty positive. Most parents and carers are doing ok – 72% were scored as having high or average levels of wellbeing. These are the best results in all 4 rounds of the CEYRIS survey. Things have improved since pandemic times and it is important that we remember this.

But the situation continues to be tougher for parents and carers living in low income households. Their wellbeing is lower overall, and they have less access to support networks. These factors demand attention and a response.    

The report findings in relation to parenting support are particularly helpful. Parents / carers with children under 5 were asked about their support requirements. 43% of parents of 2 year olds and 3 year olds respectively said that they wanted to access parenting support but did not because there was nothing on offer. 38% of parents / carers living in low income households indicated similarly.  We need to use these findings to argue for increased access.

A follow up question was asked about the impact of parenting support on those who had accessed it. The response to this question was intriguing and not necessarily what I would have predicted. Only 29% of parents and carers stated that the support received had had a positive impact on their parenting confidence. This felt low to me. It made me wonder whether the type of support being offered is what parents need or of the quality they deserve.

And this is where statistics can only ever provide part of the picture, as important as they are. We need to speak to parents and carers directly if we want to really understand what their experiences are like and why they feel the way they do. Earlier this year Parenting across Scotland published our own evidence review, bringing together 28 studies published in 2023 that focus on parenting experiences. It focuses on many of the same areas as CEYRIS – including poverty and mental health. The quotes and personal testimonies included are incredibly powerful and can, I think, add useful content to CEYRIS’ findings. I’ve included one quote below:

“We are lonely and isolated. We are cold in our own home. I feel I’ve failed my daughter. My daughter rarely leaves her bed to keep warm. We are arguing as she wants heat on at all times. Just now it’s snowing.”

This is a parent that desperately needs support. But their need is much wider than parenting skills and confidence alone. Their words illustrate why whole family support is so essential, responding as it does to their whole life – their housing, their finances and resources, employment, education, relationships, the works.

We have a collective job ahead to ensure that all families feel supported with the things they really need in order to thrive. CEYRIS may not provide information about how we make that a reality, but by providing evidence about the extent of the need and which parents / carers are struggling most, we are more aware about the scale of the task. That strikes me as useful mental health research.

Find out more about Parenting Across Scotland

Author: David MacKay, Head of Policy, Projects and Participation, Children in Scotland

The fourth and final round of the CEYRIS survey presents anyone working in children and young people’s policy with some interesting and challenging reading. Our policy calls at Children in Scotland are always evidence based so wide-ranging national data sets, like those included in the CEYRIS reports, are very helpful in informing our policy development work and helping us to identify the implementation gaps.

The new CEYRIS reports present a fascinating snapshot of how children and families are getting on as we navigate this turbulent post-pandemic world. Although there are some positives, the data backs up many of the things we are hearing through the projects we deliver and from our members – inequalities in Scottish society are continuing to grow, and this is having a range of negative impacts on families.

For me, one of the key standouts from the research was the mental health and wellbeing information reported. We know the pandemic and the current cost-of-living crisis has had a significant impact on the mental health of both children and adults and this certainly comes through in the data.

Children’s mental health and wellbeing
At Children in Scotland, we regularly hear from children and young people that mental health is a key concern for them. They have told us about the need for better education around mental health and for low-level mental health and wellbeing support to be available to them early on. They have also highlighted the barriers to seeking help that can exist for children and young people.

Children and young people have told us:

“In my experiences mental health problems are only shared, reluctantly, after a major issue has arisen. There are less conversations about general mental wellbeing.”

“Despite progress, there is still stigma surrounding mental health issues.”

They also continue to identify the importance of relationships in supporting positive mental health. This includes relationships with their peers, relationships with family members and relationships with professionals (including education staff, health professionals and youth workers).

During the pandemic, Children in Scotland saw and heard about the wide range of negative mental health impacts for children and young people. And we know that for certain groups, including children with additional support needs, children from minority ethnic families, care-experienced young people and children and young people impacted by poverty, the mental health impacts were even more strongly felt. This was reflected in a recent Scottish COVID-19 Inquiry evidence session that Children in Scotland hosted for our members.   

In the CEYRIS survey, 35% of parents and carers reported mental health concerns about their child. This is a significant proportion of children, but the data becomes more alarming when we examine it through an income lens. When taking economic circumstances into consideration, nearly half (48%) of parents/carers from low-income families reported a concern about their child’s mental health.

The research also uses Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire scores to assess concerns about children’s behaviour and emotions. This data also identifies significant differences in scores between the income groups, with the proportion of children from low-income households scoring a ‘very high’ difficulties score three times higher in comparison to better off households (38% as opposed to 12%).

Support for parents and carers and access to services 
Continuing to explore the data through an income-related perspective, another key finding that jumped out was the was the disparity around mental health and wellbeing scores for parents and carers. More than double the proportion of parents and carers from low-income households reported low mental wellbeing compared to those from high-income families (43% as opposed to 20%).

The data also shows that those households with lower incomes were also more likely to have concerns about their lack of support network. Nearly a third (30%) of low-income households raised this as an issue whereas only 19% of families from high-income families said they had a lack of support. Parents and carers from lower-income households also reported more challenges accessing GPs, Health Visitors, Dentists and Family Support Workers.

We regularly hear about the impact of poverty and its connection to poor parental mental health through our work. For example, Children in Scotland’s Open Kindergarten project worked with parents and carers who were struggling to cope with poverty and poor mental health, and who were feeling isolated and alone with no real support network.   

Ensuring that the right community-focused, relationship-based supports and services are in place for families can help to overcome some of these challenges. As one parent attending the Open Kindergarten project told us, “At the moment I still struggle with depression, but to have this is a lifeline. It gets me out of the house. These four walls keep closing me in.”

Prevention is the key
The CEYRIS research helps to reinforce the need to shift to more preventative approaches but, nearly 15 years on from the publication of the Christie Commission report which advocated for this, Scotland is still struggling with how to make this shift.

We know that poverty and deprivation significantly impacts children’s opportunities to access their rights, affecting their ability to grow, flourish and enjoy good physical and mental health. This data highlights how much work we still have to do to tackle child poverty and its negative impacts if we are to truly make improvements in children’s and parents’ mental health and deliver on Scottish Government’s recently refreshed Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy. 

While the CEYRIS data has its limitations, it is one of the many pieces of evidence that can help us to understand the challenges we face and develop better policies and interventions to support children and families.

Find out more about Children in Scotland

Author: Dr Steffi Keir, Save the Children Scotland

Poverty affects children in many ways, both their childhoods just now and their future: It adversely impacts on educational and health outcomes as well as future earnings. The youngest children are especially hard hit when they grow up in families who experience poverty.  We know that poverty is likely to have long lasting adverse impact on children’s learning, development and life chances the earlier it is experienced.  That is why it is so important to gather good, robust evidence around the experiences of the youngest children.

At Save the Children Scotland, we work tirelessly both to reduce child poverty and its short- and long-term impact on children. The COVID-19 pandemic left a particular imprint on children who already experienced poverty and on babies spending their formative earliest years during lockdown. It also meant that some families experienced poverty for the first time. CEYRIS provides a useful tool to quantify this. We are particularly interested in the data relating to the youngest age group and low-income families.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we knew through our programmes and policy work that many families were already struggling financially. We were immediately worried that the pandemic would exacerbate financial difficulties as well as potentially lead to families experiencing poverty for the first time. We also were keenly aware that pandemic measures could have unforeseen and long-lasting consequences for the youngest children who were born into the pandemic or experiencing the crucial first two years of their lives in significantly changed circumstances. Babies’ and young children’s experiences were severely curbed by pandemic control measures.

At Save the Children Scotland, we were keen to listen to the experiences of families with young children both during the pandemic, and to hear how they were faring since. This influenced our own policy calls while we also establish opportunities for families to speak directly to decision makers. We distilled the experiences that families told us about as well as their key concerns in a number of reports, making recommendations for action, such as increasing and expanding the Scottish Child Payment, in reports such as Dropped into a Cave,  Nice to Just Feel Secure, and Better for Babies.

The CEYRIS study immediately struck us as a tool to use data to measure and understand how the youngest children and their parents experienced the pandemic and its further fallout. It proved particularly useful for us where the data was segregated by income levels as well as included the experiences of very young children and their parents, which can be missing in research. This complemented our own qualitative research into families’ experiences which we conducted in partnership with community-based organisations who directly support families. The various rounds of the CEYRIS survey and its reports both helped us identify what we wanted to know more about from families, as well as supported our independent findings when speaking to parents of children under 5 with quantitative rigour.

Rounds 3 and 4 were particularly valuable with their increased focused on the differences between families on different income levels and clearly showed the disproportionate impact of the pandemic and post pandemic cost of living crisis on families on lower incomes.

When we collated evidence for our Early Years Knowledge Bank, an open resource that distils relevant evidence and learning relating to babies and young children and their parents who are experiencing poverty, the CEYRIS study was particularly informative for our thematic spotlight on the in families experiencing poverty which we were keen to bring it to a UK wide audience both through the Early Years Knowledge Bank, and as part of our associated Learning Network Webinar. This demonstrated the complex immediate and long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on young children and how to ensure that learning from this can inform both actions needed now to ensure children are prioritised in the recovery periods, as well as future crises situations in a way that mitigates negative impact on babies and young children experiencing poverty. 

CEYRIS Round 4 Report 4 – Household economic circumstances in particular shows the strong link between family type and poverty and how solutions to child poverty must target the specific risk factors for poverty such as one parent families and larger families. It also provides additional evidence that poverty is not a result of unemployment, with 76% of children in low-income households being in working households.

Low-income households were more likely to have seen a reduction in income compared to medium and high-income households, despite increases to the Scottish Child Payment. Due to financial constraints, children in low-income households are still more likely to miss out on typical childhood experiences such as birthday parties, family trips and activities, or participation in sports. This of course impacts on early learning opportunities which can have a lasting impact on children.

The challenge remains to ensure that families experiencing low incomes are adequately represented in quantitative studies and surveys. Respondent numbers are significantly lower for this group, which hinders the distillation of data when a number of criteria are applied, such as child age + income; family type + child age + income; which would further enhance the data and help translate these into policy calls and actions that are specific and targeted towards groups that are at higher risk of negative impacts.  But notwithstanding this, the survey data remains extremely valuable.

The big question is what we do with the evidence. Save the Children will continue to use this in its advocacy and campaigning, urging all decision makers to take action that helps Scotland to end child poverty.

Find out more about Save the Children in Scotland

Author: Marguerite Hunter Blair, Chief Executive, Play Scotland 

The Olympic Games have come to a close this month and every competitor taking part will have started their journey to Paris by just playing. By ‘just playing’ games as a child, we all learn to develop our physical skills, build resilience, nurture our curiosity and interact with others. For some this can lead to Olympic acclaim, and for the rest of us our play experiences often result in lifelong scars on our knees and happy memories framed by people and place. But ‘just playing’ leaves a legacy far beyond childhood.

Dr David Whitebread, a developmental cognitive psychologist and early years specialist said:

“Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species, alongside language, culture and technology. Indeed, without play, none of these other achievements would be possible.

Psychological research has established that there are five fundamental types of human play. These are commonly referred to as: physical play, play with objects, symbolic play, pretence or socio-dramatic play, and games with rules. Each supports a range of cognitive and emotional developments, and a good balance of play experience is regarded as a healthy play diet for children.”   

The places in which we all live and play shape our health, wellbeing and life chances. Creating a healthy balance of play opportunities for children and young people is of vital importance and requires a wide range of professions to understand the barriers which can affect any child. These barriers can be framed as a lack of space, time, and permission to play and can disproportionately impact those who already experience discrimination, exclusion, or challenges.

We know from surveys and research that how children and young people spend their time has changed significantly over the last thirty years, with a reduction in the time spent playing outdoors, a massive contraction in their independent mobility and a huge increase in screen-based entertainment. For some children this retreat from outdoor play has been further exacerbated by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even before the recent pandemic, research showed that challenges faced by children – poverty, disadvantage or disability discrimination – lead to more inequality of play opportunities. It was not surprising then to read in the findings from Public Health Scotland’s CEYRIS reports that ‘visits to local greenspace by children varied by household income, housing tenure and access to outside space at home. A higher percentage of children living in low-income households, social housing or with no access to outside space at home had not visited greenspace at all in the previous week compared to other groups.’ The CEYRIS reports have consistently highlighted inequalities in access to outdoor spaces for children living in low-income households, social housing, or with no access to outside space at home. Local spaces are particularly important to children with little or no play space at home. It is not surprising then to find that children in the poorest families, and those who are most vulnerable, are most affected by lack of access to outdoor space at home and in run-down and poorly maintained environments.

Play Scotland has campaigned to influence a range of policies to address play as a social and spatial justice issue and the CEYRIS reports have been providing compelling accounts of the continuing inequalities of play opportunities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, colleagues we worked with in child development and child psychiatry agreed that children were experiencing multiple harms as a consequence of play deprivation. This makes it critical that we address the findings in the CEYRIS reports and do more to ensure that all children and families have everyday access to a wide range of safe and stimulating play experiences at home, in learning environments and in the community.

The Play Strategy for Scotland is founded on the principles of children’s rights and their right to play, inclusion and play sufficiency. In Scotland, play is now recognised as part of the universal policies and the qualities of successful places There are provisions for the protection of existing play opportunities, incorporation of play opportunities into blue green infrastructure, as well as in the designing of streets and public realm, to adopt the principles that help to create safer environments, and liveable places to enable more spontaneous play opportunities for children. The findings of the CEYRIS reports have contributed to these welcome developments and have a role to play in further tackling the challenges faced by children and families.

The importance of place, and a strong commitment to improving community participation and play opportunities to tackle inequalities has been a key feature in Scottish policy and public health strategies. It is now strengthened by planning reforms introduced by the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 and by the UNCRC (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024. Fully implementing these policies and measures is an Olympian challenge for all of us and is vital for every child’s optimal development and enjoyment of childhood.