Kids and COVID-19 resilience: How much stress is too much?

Experts weigh in on the impact of the pandemic on Canada's children, from isolation to masking to mental health.

As any parent can attest, one thing that’s helped push them through the hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a promise, and sometimes a prayer: “Kids are resilient. They will be OK.”

The line has been fed to guardians and caregivers worldwide, by doctors, politicians and well-meaning sympathetic onlookers.

But as the pandemic drags on, having just passed its two-year anniversary, is it really that simple? Is there a limit to a child’s resilience?

Before considering resilience, Sheri Madigan, a clinical psychologist and Director of the Determinants of Child Development Lab at the University of Calgary, says we need to first look at how the pandemic has affected the mental health of children and adolescents over the past two years.

“When we look at how kids were doing pre-pandemic and how they’re doing during the pandemic, we (are) seeing higher rates of depression, anxiety and eating disorders,” Madigan told Global News, pointing to her recent work that examined how more than 80,000 youth worldwide were coping approximately a year-and-a-half into the pandemic.

The study, titled Global Prevalence of Depressive and Anxiety Symptoms in Children and Adolescents During COVID-19: A Meta-analysis, found that the prevalence of depression and anxiety symptoms in children and adolescents has doubled when compared to pre-pandemic estimates.

“In disasters like the pandemic, although some people use the notion of ‘bouncing back’ as being equivalent to ‘resilience,’ we have moved away from that simplistic idea of resilience,” says Robin Cox, a professor in the Disaster and Emergency Management graduate programs at Royal Roads University.

“In a disaster we talk about resilience as more the ability to anticipate what is going to happen and the ability to weather it and continue to function as more changes are happening.”