Human development in times of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic represented a highly dynamic cause of multisystem disturbances that evoked complex and largely differing responses of countries, communities, neighbourhoods, families, schools, and individuals. With these multisystem complexities in mind, it is nearly impossible to fully understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on human development. Nevertheless, when applying appropriate research designs, it is possible to gain some major insights on how human development unfolded during this global crisis. The main goal of this special section was to collect some of the strongest studies that have been conducted to better understand various aspects of human functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic, with an emphasis on youth and their caregivers. The studies that were chosen for this special section comprise children, adolescents, emerging adults, and mothers, and they aimed to better understand changes in life satisfaction, mental health, academic motivation, food intake, and parenting. Taken together, these studies provide highly informative spotlights on human development in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they call for future analyses to further elucidate unexpected findings that might have occurred more often than we have initially thought.