What Are Parents Feeling During the COVID-19 Crisis?

Introduction

While India continues to remain in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, and as the country grapples to keep the economy afloat, schooling and education are among those areas disrupted by the crisis. As an organisation whose work with schools involved significant fieldwork, we realised that it could be a long time before schools can be physical learning spaces again. One of our central concerns has thus become: how can we help students learn and stay engaged during this crisis?

In answering this question, we realised that we needed to understand parents’ fears, opinions, and hopes before we could design learn-from-home programs that would address the real challenges facing these students and their families. This report is our initial attempt to understand the opinions and attitudes of 60 parents regarding learning from home in the time of the coronavirus pandemic. These parents’ children are enrolled in government schools across urban/peri-urban regions in Bangalore, Karnataka. Most of these parents come from low-income backgrounds and many of them are daily wage workers.

The method used to collect this data was structured interviews, conducted by members of our team over phone calls. Among those parents whose contact details were available, respondents were selected randomly. The 60 respondents include 27 males and 33 females. About 80% of the respondents were an earning member of their family.

What are parents’ biggest challenges right now?

According to data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the unemployment rate in India as of May 17 is significantly high at 24% — for comparison, it was about 8% in early March. Labourers (especially migrant) and small traders remain the most affected categories of workers. Parents’ responses to the interview reflect this nationwide trend: in the current situation, loss of work is the biggest threat to the respondents and their families. Following close behind are the challenges of ensuring adequate food rations and safety from the virus.

The biggest takeaway for education professionals should be to keep these risks in mind as they encourage parents to invest time and effort into their children’s education. The responses reflect that survival is a priority for these families right now.

How are children spending their time at home?

The most common age group of children at home, among those surveyed, is 7–14 yrs. The following graph shows us a gender-wise breakdown of children’s activities at home. The sample contains 61 girls and 35 boys.

In general, the responses show that there are attempts to continue learning through online content, as well as increased playtime for children at home.

The biggest takeaway, however, from this comparison is the gender disparity in the type of activity. While boys and girls seem to have equal rates of participation in activities such as learning from online content or worksheets, there is a huge difference in activities like playing games or helping with household chores.

Boys are more engaged in playing-related activities, whereas girls are disproportionately more engaged in helping with household chores. There are also more boys who are “at home with nothing particular to do” than girls.

This disparity is important for us to keep in mind as we design learn-from-home activities for students. While we rely on parents to support their children’s learning during this time, it might be helpful to keep in mind that certain girl students may have different expectations at home, and that some students are more likely to be tired or busy during this time. In short, our activities might have to account for a disparity that does not exist in schools.

Looking at children’s activities across age groups shows us that close to 50% of children below 7 yrs are not engaged in any particular learning activity, which is a potential area to explore in terms of learning content. We might also think about the effort parents would need to put in for assisting children below 7 yrs of age (in comparison with other age groups), and design content and activities accordingly.

Children within the 7–14 yrs age group are largely engaged in household chores, playing games, and learning through online content — here, of course, the household chores are largely dominated by girl children. Given that about 40% of children in the 7–14 yrs age group are already engaged in learning content as opposed to 18% in the 15–18 yrs age group, one way forward is also to think about learning activities and content geared towards older students.

Except for the disproportionately large participation in household chores among the 7–14 yr old children, overall trends show us roughly the same distribution of activities across age groups. In planning activities for children at home, interventionists might also want to think about the differences required in playtime vs online content vs activities for the various age groups.

What do parents think about learning from home?

Despite the severe survival challenges brought about by the COVID-19 crisis, many parents indicated willingness and availability to work with their children to continue their learning at home.

Parents also indicated whether they had access to certain resources. Here, it is important to note that the surveyed parents belong to an urban/peri-urban context, where the availability of resources might look different from that of a rural context.

The chart tells us two things: one, that smartphones have penetrated more than TVs; two, that people might not be aware that they can access radio services via their smartphones. At least for parents at this socioeconomic level, it might be valuable to invest time and effort in working with smartphone-based training and learning resources.

Based on these responses, sharing content online through smartphones (and WhatsApp, specifically) could be a quick way to reach students through their parents. It is also interesting to note that a majority of parents are very interested in the idea of learning from home, so long as they are not required to be involved directly. It is possible that they perceived ‘learning from home’ to happen without their presence: since 70% said yes to learning from home and only 53% said they can spend less than an hour actually involved in learning from home.

Approximately 80% of the parents indicated that their children have access to their WhatsApp, and 60% of parents felt able to share learning resources with children across their neighbourhood — for areas with limited internet access, this could be a way forward in identifying community leaders. Beyond these possibilities, parents also mentioned certain challenges that they felt would impact learning from home efforts.

While time and technology featured in the responses, the most commonly perceived challenge was the parents’ own lack of skill or expertise.

This response is a common concern expressed by parents in the context of their children’s education, especially by those who work daily wage jobs or are uneducated. While our field team has tried to encourage parent participation in their children’s education through parent-teacher meetings or home visits in the past, we might have to reimagine how parents can see themselves as an essential part of their children’s learning experience during the COVID-19 crisis.

Conclusions and Main Takeaways

• Boys and girls have different expectations and behaviour patterns at home. Accounting for gender differences in space and time to learn from home might be one of the bigger challenges in designing learning experiences for children at home.
• While there is an abundance of content available for those who have access to the internet, content availability is not consistent across age groups. The data indicates that there is potential to create more accessible content for students in K-3 and higher grades.
• Parent mobilisation: While parents support the idea of learning from home, they may not have the confidence and willingness to engage with those activities directly. How can we encourage parents to guide their children through the learn-from-home process? Interventionists will have to take into account the parent’s confidence and willingness to engage with activities designed for learning from home.
• A population that is left out of remote/digital structures for learning is communities without phone network coverage or access to the internet. One possibility for reaching this population is through community leaders who might leverage their own resources and be able to share content or activities with those whom interventionists cannot directly reach.