Lessons for the Next Pandemic: What Children Taught Us About Navigating New Social Norms During COVID-19

Research on children’s responses to preventive health behaviors during COVID-19 provides insights of both practical and theoretical importance: Understanding how children reason about preventive behaviors is crucial for developing effective public-health campaigns. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic presented us with a unique natural experiment for examining children’s emerging sociomoral reasoning in the face of rapidly changing norms and social practices. Here we summarize empirical findings from a series of experiments testing how children reason about preventive health behaviors such as mask-wearing and physical distancing that were introduced during COVID-19. Across these studies, we found that children apply sociomoral principles to interpret these novel behaviors. By as young as the age of 5 years, children are well equipped to adapt to novel norms and social practices by thinking through the trade-offs and social consequences of these new behaviors in a surprisingly mature and practical way. At the same time, political views of families and communities are reflected in children’s endorsement of preventive behaviors. We conclude with suggestions on the way developmental research can contribute to our knowledge of how to successfully prepare for public-health responses in anticipation of potential future pandemics.