A new study shows how children’s and adolescents’ memories of the COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 changed over time and related to their mental health. The work, published Aug. 14 in Child Development, shows how autobiographical memories are linked to mental health, and how the content of these memories is related to the negative psychological consequences of lockdown. 

The findings could give parents and caregivers insight into which children are most at risk for mental health issues following stressful events, and into ways to help children process difficult memories while maintaining mental well-being.

In March 2020, first author Tirill Fjellhaugen Hjuler, then a graduate student in Denmark, was about to spend a year in Professor Simona Ghetti’s lab at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. When COVID-19 cancelled Hjuler’s travel plans, she instead developed a plan to survey autobiographical memory in children and adolescents as Denmark, like many other countries, went through a series of lockdowns and school closures. 

“Examining autobiographical memory about lockdown periods provided an unprecedented vantage point on how children and adolescents experienced and were affected by this global event,” said Ghetti, who is a coauthor on the paper with Hjuler and Daniel Lee of UC Riverside.

Autobiographical memory is the ability to recall past experiences and place them in both a personal and historical context, creating a story about our life and place in the world. Major historical events – such as the COVID-19 pandemic – can create milestones in our memories. At the same time, isolation, social distancing and lack of other activities during COVID lockdowns could reduce noteworthy events from which memories are made. 

The ability to form these autobiographical narrative memories develops during childhood and solidifies during adolescence. 

Personal memories and mental health

Hjuler surveyed a group of 247 Danish schoolchildren aged from 8 to 16 years three times in 2020 and 2021. In Denmark, schools were closed from March 1, 2020 to April 17 (preschool to fifth grade) or May 18 (sixth to ninth grades), and again from Dec. 17, 2020 to May 6, 2021. The Danish lockdowns also included closure of leisure activities such as movie theaters and sports facilities, work-from-home orders and bans on gatherings. The surveys were conducted in June 2020, January 2021 and June 2021.

At each timepoint, the children were asked to write about their personal memory of the first lockdown and assess their psychological well-being and depressive symptoms. 

“We found that children’s and adolescents’ mental health decreased over time, and that adolescent females fared the worst at all time points,” Hjuler said. “Second, we found that the content of memories lost detail over time, in terms of episodic specificity, semantic content, and emotional valence.”

Children and adolescents whose narrative memories initially contained more negative content, and more factual content about COVID-19 and the lockdowns, had the worst mental health outcomes over time, Hjuler said. 

“Our findings suggest that the way children and adolescents remember and reflect upon difficult times, such as the COVID-19 lockdowns, might affect their mental health over time” Hjuler said. 

Encouraging the detailed retrieval of past meaningful events may be adaptive because it affords more content and thus more opportunity to reflect on the importance and personal meaning of a life event, Ghetti said. Reminiscing with caregivers about shared experiences may support the ability to retrieve rich autobiographical memories while supporting mental health. 

Hjuler is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark.