Thank you for inviting me, Mr. Chair.
I want to contribute to the committee some of the results from a development study on the effects of COVID on children and families. It's an ongoing study of research syntheses, in which we have basically collected all of the available peer reviewed, high-quality research. Today, I want to give you a snapshot, a summary of some of the progress we have been making on the results.
The impact of COVID can be categorized in three broad categories: family dynamics and stress on parents; children's mental health; nutrition, physical activity and media, simply to give you an idea. These categories are a little artificial. They overlap sometimes, but the important thing is that they capture the essential ingredients of the impact.
Regarding the stress on parents, one of the things we see reported in the peer reviewed literature is the effect of home schooling and the fact that the parents have to juggle careers and to take cuts or make a financial decision to lessen their income to stay with children. There aren't a lot of external supports to make up for these losses. But at the same time, the surprising thing is that there are protective factors and positive influences on family dynamics due to the fact that the children are closer to their parents.
One of the essential things that has been very much talked about is what is now called the “she-cession”, the fact that women are hard hit by this economic collateral damage of COVID. One of the surprising things is that there is a perception that men have taken up more of families' domestic work. Even so, women continue to be at a disadvantage because they are likely to have jobs that cannot be performed at home. They work 15 more hours at home on unpaid domestic labour, and they are the ones who are suffering more from the economic situation, with an increased risk of gender gap, increased poverty and divorce. You should look at the Stats Canada report that was released in 2020.
For young, middle and adolescent children, we have an array of factors at play. Disability is one major factor, which also plays into stress and the family's hardship. Domestic violence is not necessarily addressed by the fact that there is isolation and home orders. Lack of socialization especially hits young children in periods when socialization is very important for communication and learning.
Virtual learning is also not a positive experience for some of the students, and it is not necessarily leading to very good outcomes. You have poverty in youth. There are also the added effects of media exposure, especially the fact that we are constantly immersed in a media war disaster climate that unconsciously plays on the mental health of young children.
Many of these changes are due to school closures, or the flip-flop of closure and opening and changes. The main outcomes are documented as being increased anxiety and depression.
To conclude, other aspects that are intimately correlated and have an affect on children and youth are their sedentary behaviour and decreased physical activity, which is correlated with a higher use of social media and mobile devices, and a decrease in the quality of nutrition, especially take-home fast food and other things that are not appropriate nutrition for development.
We are working on a general framework to make more sense of this. I have provided the document. Maybe you could look at the framework that we are creating to interpret and organize this data and make it more accessible and contribute to the ongoing study.
Thank you so much.