How have families been doing during the pandemic?

NIEER (the National Institute for Early Education Research) used a national survey to find out.

“The pandemic has dealt a one-two punch to the nation’s young children, decreasing opportunities to learn in preschool programs while sapping parents’ capacity to support learning at home,” W. Steven Barnett says in a news release. Barnett is NIEER’s senior co-director and founder and an author of the survey report.

The survey results were collected in December 2020 “from a nationally representative sample of one thousand and one parents of children age three to five.” This builds on a previous survey that NIEER conducted last spring.

“Overall, we found the pandemic resulted in significant loss of important learning opportunities for young children through the fall into December,” NIEER says in a press release.

“Participation in preschool programs declined sharply from pre-pandemic levels. Although most who attended preschool programs did so in-person, this was not true for young children in poverty who had less than 1/3 the access to in-person education of children in higher income families.”

In the report that summarizes the survey results, NIEER points to seven ways that the pandemic has impacted young children and their parents. They are:

• Participation in center-based preschool programs remained substantially below pre-pandemic levels and much of what did occur was not in-person.

• Support for young children with disabilities appears to have suffered.

• Many more young children had high levels of social and emotional difficulties than expected.

• Preschool programs continue to struggle with assuring all young children eligible for either free or reduced-price meals get them.

• Parents had considerable difficulty with their children’s preschool programs—particularly if their children were attending remotely.

• Among the hardships parents reported from the pandemic, the most common was getting less work done due to child care and education issues.

• Fewer parents reported reading to their children and teaching their children pre-academic skills.

As WIBC FM radio reports, Pam Leeper has also felt the pandemic’s impact. Leeper is the e-learning program coordinator at the Freedom Center in Indianapolis, Ind. Before the pandemic, the center had 40 preschool students. But only a few students returned in the fall, so the center offers e-learning instead.

“Parents were just afraid to send their kids during coronavirus and then they just got into a routine or they didn’t have their jobs and didn’t have the money to send them,” Leeper tells WIBC.

“The young kids, they feel they can catch up. But it is going to be up to us adults, up to the teachers to find a way how.”