Abstract:

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has renewed focus on the importance of health education and health literacy of school-age children in order to improve the health and well-being of future generations. When designing effective health activities in school, it is crucial to first assess children’s perception of health and illness, which may have changed during the pandemic. By mid-March 2020, and in view of the high incidence and mortality by COVID-19 in Spain, the Government decreed a state of alarm. From that moment on, exceptional preventive measures, such as a nationwide home confinement and school closures, were adopted to control spreading of the infection. Considering these unprecedented circumstances, the present research aims to explore the possible impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the perception of health and illness of a group of children from the Basque Country (northern Spain), whose ages ranged from 8 to 9 years. To this end, they were first asked to complete an open-answer questionnaire, and subsequently to draw a healthy and an ill person.

Questionnaires and drawings were collected at two different moments:
(i) prior to the official declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic (January 2020) and
(ii) after nine months into it (November 2020). After months into pandemic, students emphasized the central roles of good nutrition and physical activity in maintaining good health.

In addition, most of them assigned positive feelings to health construct. In contrast, we found that the pandemic reinforced the linkage that children established between illness and sedentary attitudes. At the same time, students associated health and illness mainly to physical factors, underestimating social and/or emotional ones. To our knowledge, this preliminary case-study sheds light for the first time on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the way children perceive and represent health and illness. Our findings also evidence the need to move away from normative and guilt-ridden education, and foster interdisciplinary approaches to address the different dimensions of health and illness, including physical, emotional, social and environmental ones.

Keywords:

Health education, previous ideas, healthy habits, causes of illnesses, Coronavirus.