Confinement Brought Children Closer to Their Parents

What the research found

A team led by Alexandros Papandreou surveyed 958 elementary school children in Greece and compared how they fared before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The children were drawn from roughly 400 schools, most of them around Athens. Their average age was 9.3 years. The study appeared in the journal Children in April 2023.

The design matters, so it is worth stating plainly at the outset. This was not a study that followed the same children through the pandemic. It compared four separate groups of children: gifted and non-gifted children assessed before COVID-19, and gifted and non-gifted children assessed afterwards. The pre-pandemic groups were small, 87 children each. The post-pandemic groups were larger, 147 gifted and 637 non-gifted. Giftedness was defined by a high score on a reasoning test combined with an interview judging ability, task commitment and creativity.

Each child answered a long questionnaire, 296 items across eleven areas, and their parents answered a parallel version. The areas covered emotional balance, perceived support from family and parents, sources of motivation, attitudes towards others, and perfectionism.

The headline result was that children after the pandemic looked, on many measures, better rather than worse. Emotional balance rose significantly in both gifted and non-gifted children (p < 0.01). Perceived family support also rose (p < 0.01), and here the non-gifted children reported the larger gain in parental support. The authors read this as a sign that home confinement drew children and parents closer, with parents more involved in schooling than before.

Motivation moved in the same direction. After the pandemic, both groups reported significantly stronger internal motivation, the drive that comes from within rather than from rewards or pressure, and significantly fewer motivation deficits (both p < 0.01). This sits awkwardly beside another of the study’s observations: gifted children themselves described remote instruction as neither appropriate nor efficient. The distance learning the pandemic forced on them was not, in their own account, a good way to learn. Yet the motivation measures still rose.

Attitudes shifted too. What the authors call condescending attitudes increased in both groups, more so among gifted children (p < 0.01). Conforming attitudes, the tendency to go along with the group, fell in both (p < 0.01). Perfectionism intensified after the pandemic (p < 0.01), and the authors note this was most pronounced among girls.

What it means for you and your child

The comforting message here is real but narrow. In this sample, the pandemic years were not the emotional catastrophe for children that many parents feared. Children came out more motivated, more emotionally settled, and closer to their families. If your child spent those years learning from a kitchen table and you worried about lasting damage, this study offers a modest reason for reassurance.

But read the design before you lean on the result. Because the pre-COVID and post-COVID groups were different children, the study cannot tell you that any individual child changed. It can only tell you that the group measured afterwards scored differently from the group measured before. Those two groups were not matched in size or, necessarily, in background. The post-pandemic gifted group was nearly twice the size of its pre-pandemic counterpart, and the non-gifted group was more than seven times larger. When you compare groups assembled at different times, differences between them can come from who happened to be included, not from the pandemic itself. This is an association, not a demonstrated cause.

The authors are honest about a second problem. Their questionnaire was purpose-built and largely unvalidated. Only four of the eleven measures reached acceptable internal consistency, a basic check that the questions in each area actually hang together; three more scraped past a weaker threshold. That means several of the reported findings rest on measures the authors themselves cannot fully vouch for. Treat the specific numbers as suggestive rather than settled.

There is also the matter of timing. Children were assessed at different points during an unstable period, under different phases of lockdown and different distance learning arrangements. A child surveyed during strict confinement and one surveyed as schools reopened were living quite different lives. That variation is baked into the results and cannot be cleanly separated out.

So what can you take from it? Two things worth holding gently. First, the finding that closeness to parents grew is plausible and echoes what many families lived through; the increased parental involvement in learning may be part of why motivation held up. Second, the rise in perfectionism, especially in girls, is worth watching. Perfectionism is common in able children, and pressure that curdles into fear of failure is not a virtue. If your daughter has grown harder on herself, that is a pattern this study flags, even if it cannot prove the pandemic caused it.

The honest summary is this. One cross-sectional study from Greece, using an unvalidated questionnaire on non-matched groups, found that children after COVID-19 looked more motivated and more emotionally secure, and gifted children no worse off than their peers. That is encouraging. It is not proof that the pandemic helped, and it should not be the last word for any single child, least of all your own.