Children, Youth and Environments

Abstract:

Many studies about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on young people have focused on them as victims or villains in the crisis and with a predominant emphasis on their schooling. This paper draws on participatory action research (PAR) with young people in the UK, Italy, Singapore and Lebanon to provide insights into the impacts of the pandemic and the changes it brought into young people's everyday personal, familial and social worlds. Using Bronfenbrenner's socio-ecological framework, the paper provides a more balanced view of the impact of the pandemic on young people, including examples of how it brought about new opportunities for young people's personal development, social actorship and political agency, in spite of the pandemic's detrimental impacts. We apply the concept of "affordances" to understand how young people have creatively, critically and reflexively responded to changes to the socio-ecological contexts that frame their lives. These are manifest through new social roles, identity development and a heightened sense of communitarianism, political awareness and active citizenship. The paper raises questions about what young people need in terms of nurturing environments to grow up in and highlights key considerations in safeguarding young people's rights in future public health crises and post-COVID rebuilding.