Address underlying social disparities and build resilience

Recommendation 3: Another crucial step is to address the social disparities that amplify the risks for harm following an event such as COVID-19. Particular attention should be paid to children who are already disadvantaged. The pandemic can be the instigation to launch initiatives such as: ensuring that no children are living in precarious socioeconomic circumstances; augmenting support services for children in need; reducing the number of avoidable adversities that children face in addition to COVID-19, including addressing racism; and rectifying inadequate living conditions in many Indigenous communities, as well as raising the levels of funding and support for child health, social and educational programs to achieve parity with non Indigenous communities. Related to this, approaches that strengthen families and communities can promote resilience when children do have to face adversities. Given the likelihood that the impact of COVID-19 may be enduring, building these foundations for resilience are crucial — through initiatives that reduce disparities and ensure that all BC children can flourish.

Track collective progress

Recommendation 4: Finally, it is important to establish ongoing systems for monitoring mental health needs and outcomes for all children — to accurately depict the needs over time and to inform the evaluation of initiatives designed to meet these needs. Such efforts should focus first on problems that are expected to increase in the short term including anxiety, depression, behaviour problems and posttraumatic stress — in addition to tracking progress at addressing underlying issues such as socioeconomic disparities. Monitoring could take the form of pragmatic yet robust population-based short surveys conducted in representative samples of children. Our review also suggests that many children who experience mental health problems after disasters eventually recover. So tracking outcomes is also a way of measuring success.