Long COVID in Children, Young People and Families

This chapter explores the impacts of Long COVID on children, young adults and their families, including discussion of help-seeking, school, relationships, mental health, and family life. Drawing on 77 UK narrative interviews (2021–2022), we demonstrate how Long COVID’s influence manifests in age- and life-stage-specific challenges. Children and adolescents encountered difficulties in eliciting acknowledgement and care in the manner expected of other debilitating illnesses. They experienced sickness absence from school as isolating, both academically and socially. Young adults experienced a wholescale disruption to their lives at a crucial stage in forming or solidifying their (presumed) adult life-course trajectories. Parents described the need for redistributions of family care tasks and renegotiations of caring roles, within the existing precarity of the family as a complex and dynamic environment.