The impact of COVID-19 on students' social-emotional well-being

Jennifer Greif Green, Ruchi Mendiratta Khanna, Andrew Bacher-Hicks and Melissa Holt

Chapter Chapter 19 in Handbook on Inequality and COVID-19, 2025, pp 310-324 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Multiple federal agencies reported concern about worsening mental health among United States youth during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, data limitations made it challenging to quantify the impact of the pandemic on youth social-emotional well-being. In this chapter, we review literature on change in student social-emotional well-being during the pandemic and leverage two data sources to estimate change in bullying and depressive symptoms. First, using Google Trends data, we demonstrate a decrease in online searches for school bullying during and following the pandemic but an increase in cyberbullying searches. Second, we replicate these findings with Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey data and additionally find depressive symptoms were rising prior to the pandemic and continued to increase in the year following. Further, we document a widening gender gap in depressive symptoms for females. We provide recommendations for improved data collection to monitor changes in youth social-emotional well-being during crises and to measure inequities.

Keywords: Pandemic; Social-emotional well-being; School; Bullying; Cyberbullying; Depression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035302758
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