Abstract
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was already considerable concern for the mental health and wellbeing of UK children, including those of primary school age. Friendship and resilience are two factors which can help children to cope in times of adversity. The pandemic and measures such as lockdown and school closures made it difficult for children to maintain their friendships in the usual ways and moreover were themselves an enormous source of stress and worry, which is likely to have further impacted the mental wellbeing of the nation’s children. This study sought to explore how families experienced the pandemic in terms of their children’s lack of access to their habitual routines and contact with their friends, by interviewing fifteen mothers of primary school-aged children during the summer and early Autumn of 2020. Interviewees revealed how they and their children attempted to meet children’s social needs during the first national lockdown and its subsequent easing, aware, through attunement, that isolation and loneliness was detrimental to their children’s wellbeing. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse and interpret the interview transcripts, and three main themes were constructed which explored the resilience and adaptation that parents and children exhibited in order to meet the children’s social needs. The implications and contribution of this research, as well as its limitations, are discussed. Children’s wellbeing, healthy development and their ability to cope in adversity are reliant on time and space to be with their friends (Graber et al., 2016). Caregivers can offer support and facilitation of this (online and offline) contact when children’s normal means of socialising become unavailable.