The COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it have disrupted the daily lives of children in innumerable ways. These impacts have unfolded unevenly, as nation, race, class, sexuality, citizenship status, disability, housing stability, and other dimensions of power have shaped the ways in which children and youth have experienced the pandemic. COVID-19 and Childhood Inequality brings together a multidisciplinary group of child and youth scholars and practitioners who highlight the mechanisms and practices through which the COVID-19 pandemic has both further marginalized children and exacerbated childhood disparities.
Featuring an introduction and ten chapters, the volume "unmasks" childhood inequalities through innovative, real-time research on children’s pandemic lives and experiences, situating that research within established child and youth literatures. Using multiple methods and theoretical perspectives, the work provides a robust, multidisciplinary, and holistic approach to understanding childhood inequality as it intersects with the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the USA. The chapters also ask us to consider pathways toward resilience, offering recommendations and practices for challenging the inequities that have deepened since the entrée of SARS-CoV-2 onto the global stage.
Ultimately, the work provides a timely and vital resource for childhood and youth educators, practitioners, organizers, policymakers, and researchers. An illuminating volume, each chapter brings a much-needed focus on the varied and exponential impacts of COVID-19 on the lives of children and youth.
Foreword
J. Michael Ryan
Introduction: Unmasking Childhood Inequality
Nazneen Khan
Part 1: Unmasking Childhood Inequality
- Pandemic Eugenics: Reproductive Justice and Racial Inequality in Childhood
- LGBTQ+ Youth and the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Turning a Blind Eye: COVID-19 and Homeless Children
- The Impact of COVID-19 on Children with Thalassemia and Their Families in India
- Youth at the Margins: Continuity of Services During the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Consequences of COVID-19 Realities and Misconceptions for Rural PK–12 Students: Implications from Rural Education Research
- The Impact of Parental Burnout and Time with Children: Family Stress in a Large Urban City During COVID-19
- When Six Feet Feels Like Six Miles: Children’s Images of Their Lives During the COVID-19 Pandemic
- The COVID-19 Pandemic: Childhood Inequalities Unmasked in the Caribbean
- Risk-Taking Among Older Youth at the Outset of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the USA
Nazneen Khan and Amaya Boswell
Jessica N. Fish, Meg D. Bishop, and V. Paul Poteat
Yvonne Vissing
Rachana Sharma
Part 2: Unmasking Institutional Entanglements
Andrea N. Hunt and Tammy Rhodes
Meagan C. Arrastía-Chisholm, Lee Edmondson Grimes, and Heather M. Kelley
Wendy Wagner Robeson and Kimberly D. Lucas
Part 3: Unmasking Pandemic Agency
Sandi K. Nenga
Aldrie Henry-Lee
Marie C. Jipguep-Akhtar, Denae Bradley, and Tia Dickerson
Biography
Nazneen Khan is an associate professor of Sociology at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, USA. She is an active member of the Children and Youth Section of the American Sociological Association and currently serves as the section’s Treasurer-Secretary. Her research and teaching employs intersectional theory and methodology and focuses on families, childhood, and motherhood at the crossroads of broader racial, economic, and political formations in the USA. Her recent scholarship has been published in Children & Society, Contexts, Sociological Focus, Critical Research on Religion, and Understanding and Dismantling Privilege.
Khan’s timely collection of essays helps us understand the true losses children, youth, and their caretakers are forced to reckon with under COVID-19. Contributing scholars shine a spotlight (as the pandemic does) on gender, race, class, health, educational, and digital inequalities that were already far-reaching in global childhood; however, there is hope in children’s agency and activism and a heightened imperative to work toward true human connection and, ultimately, real social change.
Ingrid E. Castro, Professor of Sociology, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, USA
The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly disrupted the daily lives of children across the globe. COVID-19 and Childhood Inequality offers a powerful, empirical, multidisciplinary look at how children have experienced and interpreted social inequality within the context of a pandemic. From housing instability to online schooling to access to health care to detention centers’ responses to family dynamics and beyond, this book provides rich insights that can help us all think more carefully about childhood inequality both during a pandemic and in the eventual aftermath of one.
Margaret A. Hagerman, Associate Professor of Sociology, Mississippi State University, USA
