Children’s knowledge and altruistic behaviors in COVID-19: disaster literacy through lived experience

This article explores children’s experiences, knowledge, and altruistic behaviors in the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team sought to answer the following research questions: What did children do to help others during the pandemic? Who did they assist? Why were they motivated to act? We compiled and coded 115 news articles focused on U.S. children’s actions in the pandemic. Our analyses identified eight types of altruistic behaviors that children engaged in, which we grouped into two categories. The first category encompassed children providing material resources such as: making, collecting, or distributing supplies; raising and donating money; and cooking or distributing food. The second category involved children mobilizing to advance well-being by: creating art; offering social and emotional support; providing tutoring or developing other educational services; participating in public health campaigns or vaccination efforts; and conducting or taking part in research. Children sought to help many different people, ranging from family members and friends to at-risk professionals, such as frontline workers and healthcare providers. They were also attuned to the needs of socially or economically marginalized groups, such as older adults, low-income families, and unhoused people. Different factors motivated children to act, including personal experiences, connections to others, and more abstract empathy for those suffering disparate effects in the pandemic. This research found that the pandemic may have enhanced children’s disaster literacy through increasing their recognition of disaster injustice. Children understood the myriad threats associated with the pandemic and acted altruistically in response. Their actions were motivated in part by their recognition of the deeply unequal effects of the pandemic, thus suggesting the potential for a liberatory disaster literacy that is attentive to structural inequalities. Ultimately, this study suggests that experiencing the pandemic may have planted some seeds for growing a more disaster-literate group of young people in the future.