Mental health and well-being of children and young people: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

From April 2020, we will be following 4 large groups of children and young people to investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health. Every six months (7 times) we sent the same questionnaires to children and their parents. Our results show that mental health problems such as anxiety and depression increased during the pandemic and have still not returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2023. So far we have mainly looked at average scores on the questionnaires. To gain more insight into vulnerable groups, we now want to look at the individual trajectories of children. This is possible because there are children who have participated in our research several times. We will also look at the reasons why children developed more mental problems. We do this with the answers that children have given to open questions. Our goal is that all children in the Netherlands grow up mentally healthy, even in times of a pandemic!