New study titled “The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Canadian families of children with disabilities” examines the differences in experiences between families of children with and without disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic as reported by parents or guardians of children aged 0 to 14 years.
Results for this study were drawn from Statistics Canada’s crowdsourcing data collection series The Impacts of COVID-19 on Canadians: Parenting during the Pandemic. From June 9 to June 22, 2020, over 32,000 participants voluntarily completed the online questionnaire that was designed to collect information from parents of children aged 0 to 14 about their concerns for their children and families as well as the activities of their children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Readers should note that crowdsourcing data are not collected under a probability-based sampling design. As a result, the findings cannot be applied to the overall Canadian population.
Overall, the results indicated that parents of children with disabilities and parents of children without disabilities had similar levels of concern for their families. However, a higher proportion of parents who had a child or children with disabilities were very or extremely concerned about their children’s amount of screen time, loneliness or isolation, general mental health, and school year and academic success.
