The Associations Between COVID-19-related Stigma of School-age Children and Communicative Support from Parents and Teachers

Fear and threats during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have caused stigma, but COVID-19-related stigma among children has not been well studied. We examined children’s COVID-19-related stigma among children and related factors to mitigate stigmatizing perceptions. We utilized a dataset of 1500 households from a nationwide postal survey of randomly selected children in fifth and eighth grade in Japan in December 2020. Children responded to the frequency of their caregivers’ and teachers’ communicative support (i.e., asking or accepting one’s thoughts) and three types of stigmas (self-stigma, stereotype and discrimination as public stigma) toward COVID-19. A total of 772 dyads of children and caregivers responded to the survey, and the analytic sample consisted of 768 dyads (51.2% of the target sample) after excluding missing data for the stigma variable. A multilevel mixed-effects generalized linear analysis was performed to examine the association between child stigma and communicative support from caregivers and teachers, adjusting for sampling weights. Self-stigma was the most common type of stigma among children. Both communicative support from caregivers and teachers were significantly associated with lower perceptions of discrimination. Higher support from teachers was associated with lower self-stigma among children in eighth grade and lower stereotypes among children in fifth grade. This study highlights the presence of self-stigma related to COVID-19 in middle childhood and adolescence. Communicative support from caregivers and teachers is essential to listen to children’s beliefs about COVID-19, to provide emotional safety, and to mitigate stigma during difficult times.