Family perspectives of COVID-19 research

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has uniquely affected children and families by disrupting routines, changing relationships and roles, and altering usual child care, school and recreational activities. Understanding the way families experience these changes from parents’ perspectives may help to guide research on the effects of COVID-19 among children. MAIN BODY: As a multidisciplinary team of child health researchers, we assembled a group of nine parents to identify concerns, raise questions, and voice perspectives to inform COVID-19 research for children and families. Parents provided a range of insightful perspectives, ideas for research questions, and reflections on their experiences during the pandemic. CONCLUSION: Including parents as partners in early stages of COVID-19 research helped determine priorities, led to more feasible data collection methods, and hopefully has improved the relevance, applicability and value of research findings to parents and children.