While the frequently quoted Piagetian (1954) model of children’s cognitive development suggests that their disease concepts depend primarily on age and cognitive development, Sigelman and Glaser (2019:12) argue that the complexity of children’s disease theories is only partly dependent on these factors. More decisive for their level of comprehension is the information that children receive (Au and Romo 1996:237; Sigelman and Glaser 2019:12). However, underlying factors like digital resources and language barriers influence children’s access to information (Bray et al.
2021:13), and, according to Sigelman and Glaser (2019:12), can account for differences in the children’s knowledge about Corona, as I encountered between the groups in Berlin and in Stade.
While in Stade, the teachers made specific efforts to include socially disadvantaged children, the recruitment in Berlin relied on the families’ initiative, attracting primarily children from educated middle-class families. Correspondingly, the eloquence of the participants’ explanations, their word choices, the detail of their descriptions, and the use of biomedical concepts varied between the two groups, with several children in Berlin providing extraordinarily detailed accounts. On the one hand, their digital resources may have made information about the pandemic more accessible for them. On the other hand, the teachers’ reports suggested that this group of students was academically high achieving; thus, they may have had fewer difficulties
understanding the given information. While I was not allowed to collect further data on their family background, this impression ostensibly seemed to confirm Sigelman and Glaser’s
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(2019:12) suggestion that a connection between the children’s access to information and their incorporation of biomedical concepts in their explanations of Corona.
Nevertheless, while the extent of biomedical detail used by the children’s descriptions differed between the two groups, neither the key understanding of Corona’s nature nor the presence of magical elements of thinking did. In contrast, fantastical explanations were present among all participants’ accounts. For example, the young participants’ imagination of a “tiny sick-thingy”
(Saada, Stade) invading the body with an evil purpose alluded to the idea of Corona as a strategic enemy. While studies in various contexts of emerging infectious diseases found similarly
“dramatized social representation of disease” (Wagner-Egger et al. 2011:463) among adult laypersons, the virus itself was rarely perceived as the enemy and instead pertained to the government or the media (Idoiaga et al. 2020:6). Nevertheless, the rhetoric of “the virus as an enemy or an invader to be fought” (Semino 2021:52) is frequent in the pandemic media discourse and has been argued to be influenced primarily by media coverage (Wagner-Egger et al.
2011:474–75).
Matching this perception and a key aspect of children’s conceptualisation of Corona were visible features. Yara, for instance, explained that tiny Corona viruses were visible under the microscope, reasoning that the Corona measures were necessary, so Corona “is no longer to be seen” (Yara, Stade). Similarly, the relevance of visuals in children’s concepts of impaired health and related risks has been emphasised in various studies in contexts of other infectious diseases (Akello et al.
2007:78; Bonoti, Christidou, and Spyrou 2019:737–38; Onyango-Ouma 2004:336). Regarding Corona specifically, Idoiaga and colleagues (2020:6) confirmed that children’s visual
representations of the virus matched the battle narrative mentioned above.
Given the vividness of this rhetoric, it may not be surprising to find parents in many countries overwhelmed with the abundance of available information (Bray et al. 2021:13; Okan et al.
2020:10–13). Thus, as the rising “infodemic” (Okan et al. 2020:1) made judging the sources’
trustworthiness increasingly challenging, some parents chose to withhold drastic information from their children (Bray et al. 2021:13). While meant to protect them, mental health
professionals have argued that withholding crucial information can lead children to draw their own conclusions, which often reach into magical explanations, and, in turn, may cause children to disproportionately blame themselves for others’ sickness (Dalton, Rapa, and Stein 2020:346–47).
At the same time, the disease concepts found among the children in this study partly reflect magical ideas commonly circulated in the public discourse around Corona, such as the
personification of the virus or conspiracy theories (Ejaz et al. 2021:164–66; Semino 2021:50). For
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example, when Antonia and Clemens presumed that Corona was manufactured in a laboratory, this was in line with circulating conspiracy theories that led to mass protests in all parts of Germany (Leber 2020; Stark 2020). In other words, information at the intersection of scientific information and fantasy, such as conspiracy theories and war metaphors, circulated among children and adults alike, equally influencing the young participants’ disease concepts.
In line with this influenceability, studies before the pandemic have demonstrated, children’s disease concepts are highly susceptible to health interventions. In the context of common diseases in Western Kenya, Onyango-Ouma (2004:335) demonstrates that “children hold inconsistent views about health and illness simultaneously.” However, in the course of a health intervention, the children’s explanations shift from initially fatalist ideas to acknowledging germs and contamination as causes of diseases (ibid.). A similarly strong influence of the information circulated about Corona becomes visible in the similarities between the children’s accounts of the pandemic and the media discourse, including both biomedical and magical elements.
In order to theorise the notion of such a combined concept of disease among children, Sigelman and Glaser (2019:10) proposed an intuitive model of disease, arguing that children‘s disease understanding is generally composed of both biomedical concepts and intuitive elements. Yara’s example illustrates how the children based their rationale for the measures on this combined understanding of the disease. While they generally agreed that the Corona measures were in place as protection from transmitting the virus despite slightly varying causal argumentations, they equally employed a combination of rational and irrational explanations when justifying why following a rule in one context was more important than in another. For example, most children explained that testing was essential for making the school safer; however, the uncertainties around the validity of the test results served as a rationale that the rules had to be followed even after a negative test. In other words, the possibility that a test might be false negative meant that the children could never be entirely sure that someone was not contagious. In the context of children’s conceptualisations of infection, Muñoz Marco and colleagues (2017:3) described that young children often went by the rule of thumb that “contagion can never be ruled out”
regardless of the infectiousness of the other body. While the authors hint at non-transmittable conditions, the uncertainty of Corona-related contagiousness in this study pertained to
asymptomatic bodies. While several children perceived asymptomatic bodies to be safe, some argued that asymptomatic bodies could be tested positive – hence, they could not rule out
contagion. At the same time, several children explained that meeting their Corona-friends was safe after a negative self-test, basing this argumentation mainly on trust. Thus, in a different context,
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the negative test result indeed served to rule out contagion. This example illustrates the tensions that the different approaches within the children’s explanations created.
Managing risk
In arguing that emotion and risk are entangled and mutually shape one another, Lupton
(2013b:641) adverts to this interplay of rational and irrational aspects of risk assessment that we saw in the children’s accounts. From a more individualist perspective, Zinn extends the
argument:
… this dichotomy between rational and irrational strategies neglects a whole range of everyday approaches to risk that are neither completely rational nor irrational as they may involve the use of prior knowledge and experience (Zinn 2008:439).
Indeed, an array of scholars in the social sciences have agreed that lay and professional everyday strategies of managing uncertainty frequently involve combinations of rational, non-rational, and intuitive, magical, or ritualised approaches (Brown 2020:9; Roth 1957:314; Zinn 2016:349). Zinn (2016:348) argues that when a situation is overwhelmingly complex, time and resources scarce, or knowledge limited, the intuitive component of risk-related decision-making becomes
indispensable. He further explains that these “in-between strategies” (Zinn 2016:348) entail emotion, trust, and intuition. Indeed, trust occurred frequently in the children’s risk assessment.
For instance, they grounded the safety of meeting their Corona-friends on trust or turned to those they trusted in crowded places to reduce their sense of risk. Moreover, the children regarded trustworthiness as a central criterium for assessing the risk of Corona-friends, while they
associated its lack with an increased risk of contagion. Correspondingly, the children identified strangers as risky others, using their “Otherness” (Lupton 2013b:639) to distinguish them from the safe group of family or friends. Similarly, in the course of the pandemic, Zdravomyslova and Onegina (2020:7) found a generally increased distrust towards others among adolescent girls, simultaneously perceiving their families as spaces of safety.
By avoiding risky others, the children also strengthened their bonds with safe others. As Douglas (1992:15) reminds us, such strengthening of social bonds can, from a functionalist perspective, be interpreted as the very purpose of a risk definition. Viewing risk as entangled with taboo and norms frames the children’s risk assessment as part of a process informed by the group’s priorities (Douglas 1992:15). While Douglas intricately links risk and blame, blame serves to re-establish social cohesion (ibid.). Although blame was not a topic of concern for the participants of this study, social ostracism came up in the context of embarrassment connected to risk. For
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instance, Lisa worried about a positive test her peers might see, while Alina expected it would be challenging to adhere to the rules when her friends defied them. Other studies on children’s risk perceptions surrounding infectious diseases support these findings, arguing that children’s concerns often revolve around stigmatisation (Afriyie and Essilfie 2019:35; Macintyre et al.
2004:248). While in contrast to blame, embarrassment does not point the finger at someone else, it is still an internal indicator that socially accepted norms are being disregarded (Edelmann et al.
1987:869). The fear of embarrassment, in turn, enhances adherence to these social norms (ibid.).
Pointing in a similar direction, Lupton (2013b:640) argues that the identification of risky bodies pertains to the very definition of a norm. Deviation from the “norm of accepted embodiment”
(Lupton 2013b:640) is often associated with risk. In their focus on symptoms, the participants hinted at such a perception of a pandemic body norm, namely the asymptomatic body. Friends and strangers alike were categorised as risky or safe bodies according to their presence or absence of symptoms and thus a deviation from the ideal asymptomatic body. In turn, Douglas
(1966:133) argues that the definition of a norm adverts to the socially defined boundaries of a group and that the integrity of bodily and group boundaries also distinguishes the border
between safety and risk (Alaszewski 2015:215). In this line of argumentation, the identification of bodies at risk and risky bodies further revealed the group’s values (Brown 2014:393); for instance, non-risky bodies and bodies at risk were usually trusted others the children felt attached to and cared about, such as grandparents and younger siblings.
Here, the link between knowledge about Corona and risk perception comes into play (Nnama-Okechukwu, Chukwu, and Nkechukwu 2020:598). While the children considered themselves mostly protected from a severe outcome, they still perceived themselves as bodies of potential contagion and, thus, a risk for others. Having studied adolescent girls’ risk management during the pandemic in Russia, Zdravomyslova and Onegina (2020:8) argue that “these girls of the pandemic generation have become more responsible and this can be seen in their adherence to the rules of personal and public hygiene.” Likewise, the children’s prioritisation of protecting others through their practices points at this sense of responsibility, for instance, when Bela reasoned being particularly careful to adhere to the rules in the presence of elderly.
At the same time, the children explained visiting grandparents despite the risks a visit might pose.
In these contexts, the children explained the importance of specific rituals. Washing hands, for instance, made visitors to Sinan’s house safe. In Douglas’ (1966:161) terms, rituals allowed to cross the boundaries defined by their knowledge around risk while ensuring safety (Alaszewski 2015:216). One salient example here was the Corona self-test. The children in this study argued
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that it was safe to meet their grandparents after taking a Corona test and receiving a negative result. Like Lupton and colleagues (1995:179) have shown, in the context of HIV self-tests, the diagnostic tool of Corona tests was elevated to a protective tool making certain future practices safe. In other words, tests were ascribed the ability of protection rather than detection of Corona.
Similarly, Lupton (2013b:644) claims that risk is shaped not only through interactions with others’ bodies but also with material objects, space, and place. Pointing in a similar direction, pre-pandemic research has demonstrated that especially young children employ materialist concepts when trying to make sense of diseases (Onyango-Ouma 2004:336), forming the basis of risk assessment. Like the sense of safety derived from the Corona tests, the findings of this study indicate multiple ways in which the children’s interactions with materials shaped their risk assessment. Grounded on their underlying disease knowledge, the children associated saliva and air with risk while attributing masks and hand sanitiser with the potential to mitigate exposure to such potentially contagious material. In other words, children’s understanding of risk was closely linked to how they constructed it based on their Corona knowledge.
As the use of Corona tests exemplifies saliently, the children’s risk management essentially entailed specific temporal lines of argumentation. Equally, grounding their risk assessment on previous rule adherence employed such a temporal causality. An example illustrating this is the
argumentation that if specific behaviour in the past did not lead to a Corona infection, the same behaviour must be safe in the future. In her emotion-risk-assemblage, Lupton (2013b:638), too, comments on the role of temporality, arguing that risk assessment always comprises a sense of temporality, as past experiences are integrated into an idea of a potential future. At the same time,
“risk knowledges are constantly contested and are subject to disputes and debates over their nature, their control and whom … to blame for their creation” (Tulloch and Lupton 2003:1).
This fluid character of the risk concept brings to the fore how the children constantly adjusted their perceptions to the changes of the pandemic environment. As we will see in the final section of this chapter, this ever-changing nature of the emotion-risk-assemblage presents a close link to the children’s social navigation tactics (Lupton 2013b:640; Vigh 2009:420).
Navigating rules and risk
The idea of the actors’ constant adjustment to a changing environment is central in the concept of social navigation (Vigh 2009:420). This agent-centred perspective illuminates how the children navigated between adherence to the constantly changing frame of Corona measures, different demands from parents or teachers, and their own interests. Sinan illustrated this continuous
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adaptation clearly when he explained how he shifted between staying at home to be safe and occasionally going to the playground. A negative test made him feel that he could go outside for some time, but when his friend coughed, he took an additional precaution by wearing a mask and asking his friend to do the same. In other words, Sinan developed “constantly adjusting tactics in response to the social … opportunities and constraints” (Utas 2005:426). In line with other findings on risk navigation (Lindegaard 2009:32; Utas 2005:425), Sinan shifted his tactics
depending on the situation; in other words, his agency was situated. While the test reassured him that he was no risk for others, his coughing friend represented a risk for Sinan, so his freedom to act was shaped not only by the measures but also by his own perception of risk.
The focus on children’s agency further unveils how the children placed those they considered at risk – like grandparents or babies – in a space of vulnerability, which they rejected for themselves.
While from an adults’ perspective, particularly young children’s bodies are often perceived as vulnerable (Lupton 2013a:45), the children in this study reasoned that their status as children and their bodies, thus being young, made them more resistant in contrast to old and sick bodies.
Although this notion aligns with the information distributed in the popular media, it also
indicates that the children considered themselves in an agentic position and less threatened by the pandemic than others. Instead, they perceived themselves with the ability and responsibility to protect others rather than be protected, revealing their own perception of themselves as agentic individuals.
Accordingly, open disobedience of the rules was a tactic the children rarely reported. First, it would have contradicted their understanding of contagion and their attribution of risk. Second, external forces such as teachers and parents required them to adhere to the rules. However, as I have outlined before, the children also had to dissolve tensions arising from conflicting interests, such as wishing to meet friends without adhering to the rules despite knowing that this might involve the risk of contagion. In terms of Zinn (2016:349), managing these ambiguities required strategies between rational and non-rational such as trust, emotions, and magic. Along these lines, the children defined tactics to modify the rules in ways they still found safe, but that allowed them some freedoms, such as meeting Corona-friends and justifying the safety of this action with their mutual trust.
Zdravomyslova and Onegina (2020:9) draw on Bauman (2006), arguing that these conflicts the children experience pertain to the mutual exclusion of freedom and safety. In other words, the children faced the dilemma that in their attempt to navigate towards a position characterised by more liberties, they would have to hazard the safety of those around them. In Douglas’
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(1966:161) argument, the arising tension results from crossing the boundaries of defined risks, which is a dangerous undertaking and, in turn, requires specific rituals to ensure safety. In the study, this became visible when the children argued that it was safe to meet friends or
grandparents after taking certain precautions. A prime ritual to deal with contagious, in other words, unsafe or dirty bodies, was hygiene (Douglas 1966:7). While the importance of hand hygiene was reiterated in the recommended measures against Corona, in the children’s accounts, washing and disinfecting their hands had a symbolic meaning beyond eliminating germs. Zeynep, for instance, felt that she ensured her brother’s protection from Corona almost entirely by
thoroughly washing her hands upon entering her home; Saada applied hand sanitiser before washing her hands to feel protected. Interestingly, van der Molen and Brown (2021:12) have reported a similarly ritualised role of hand hygiene among health care professionals, indicating that this attribution of magical protection is not exclusive to children’s thinking.
Above all, taking Corona tests was a protective ritual that created opportunities to participate in otherwise risky activities like visiting grandparents. Like previous descriptions about the meaning of HIV self-tests, Corona tests were thus “acting as a preventive, rather than a diagnostic
measure” (Lupton et al. 1995:179), mitigating preoccupation and, in this case, creating liberties.
Arguing that adolescent girls in Russia constructed freedoms within the pandemic restrictions, too, Zdravomyslova and Onegina (2020:9) identify two diametrical approaches among the participants of theirs study:
The first is an acceptance-based reflective model, which means accepting the risk of contracting the virus, including the constraints associated with it, and focusing on safety work. The second is a denial-based model, which means ignoring any information about the pandemic and refusing to learn about safety.
The authors report that through both models, the girls construct spaces in which they are free, either by accepting the rules and risks and moving freely within them or by defying both and ignoring the risks. However, while children in my research similarly created spaces of liberty, they rarely displayed such a dichotomous approach. Instead, they constantly shifted between defiance and adherence to Corona measures, navigating between being “at risk and a risk” (Lindegaard 2009:20) and displaying different tactics to avoid either category.
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