Children’s education and use of time during the Covid-19 lockdown in France and Italy

The Covid-19 crisis has large impacts on the economy and these impacts are probably highly unequal among individuals and families. From a family perspective the lockdown situation is having a tremendous impact on two fundamental assets of families wellbeing: parents’ work and children’s education. Children are out of school or child care, without access to group activities, team sports, or playgrounds. Parents and caregivers are attempting to work remotely or unable to work, while caring for children, with no clarity on how long the situation will last. For children, the lockdown could be a source of inequality with their classmates in terms of learning process due to heterogeneous capacities of parental investments in their schooling time. In this context, parents are struggling to cope with work, both because not working or because bound to teleworking solutions while having to take care of children, the house and possibly the elderly. Social distance implies that most working parents cannot take advantage of any form of childcare for children, in particular babysitting or grandparents. The current project aims at analyzing how much the Covid-19 lockdown is affecting the educational progress and emotional status of French and Italian children. The project will also analyse how children reallocate their use of time at home.