COVID-19: Supporting Parents, Adolescents and Children during Epidemics (Co-SPACE), 2020-2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major disruptions to families' lives in many ways, including through lockdowns, social distancing, home learning requirements, and restrictions. This resulted in a rapidly changing situation where different pressures have arisen for children, young people and their families over time. Understanding the psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and young people, through the collection of high quality data and in a way that could directly inform policy, was set out as an immediate research priority in a Lancet position paper (Holmes et al., 2020) at the start of the pandemic. The Co-SPACE study was launched on 30th March 2020, a week after the first national lockdown was implemented in the UK, with the purpose of using the findings to inform resources and support for families. It was then extended in 2022 under the project on 'Learning from the trajectories of mental health challenges for children, young people and parents over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic' in collaboration with the CORONA x CODOMO project in Japan (run by Dr Naho Morisaki at the National Center for Child Health and Development).