Children's Sleep and Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Purpose Of Review: The COVID-19 pandemic and protracted home confinement required adjustments to schedules and routines generating concern about children's sleep. This review describes general considerations regarding children's sleep, changes and disturbances in their sleep during the pandemic, and the association of sleep measures with health and psychological outcomes in general and in the context of the pandemic.

Recent Findings: A number of studies found an increase in the duration of children's sleep with later bedtimes and waketimes for some children.

Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior in Children During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Implications for Mental Health.

Purpose Of Review: This paper examines children's physical activity and sedentary behavior and associated psychological outcomes coincident with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recent Findings: Generally, the research has found decreased physical activity and increased sedentary behavior, both of which are associated with various psychological outcomes. The research on sedentary behavior has focused on screen time with minimal consideration of other sedentary behaviors or of specific physical activities or the context in which these behaviors occurred.

Inconclusive Findings in Studies of the Link Between Media Coverage of Mass Trauma and Depression in Children.

Purpose Of Review: This paper reports a review of the empirical research examining the association between mass trauma media contact and depression in children, the factors that may influence the association, and the difficulties encountered in the study of media effects on depression.

Recent Findings: All of the included studies assessed general population samples. Pre-COVID-19 research focused primarily on television coverage alone or on multiple media forms including television, while COVID-19 media studies examined various media forms including social media.

Involving children in disaster risk reduction: the importance of participation.

: Millions of children are affected by disasters every year. Children need not be passive victims, however, but instead may contribute to disaster risk reduction activities. : This paper provides a theoretical foundation for children's involvement in disaster risk reduction activities.

Assessing community resilience: A CART survey application in an impoverished urban community.

This article describes an application of the Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART) Assessment Survey which has been recognized as an important community tool to assist communities in their resilience-building efforts. Developed to assist communities in assessing their resilience to disasters and other adversities, the CART survey can be used to obtain baseline information about a community, to identify relative community strengths and challenges, and to re-examine a community after a disaster or post intervention. This article, which describes an application of the survey in a community of 5 poverty neighborhoods, illustrates the use of the instrument, explicates aspects of community resilience, and provides possible explanations for the results.

Effects of Displacement in Children Exposed to Disasters.

The literature on children's responses to disasters is well developed with increasing attention to the confounding experiences of displacement. This paper presents an overview of the emotional and behavioral effects of displacement on children and adolescents and describes their educational adjustment in terms of both academic achievement and school behavior. A summary of family effects elucidates how children's functioning is influenced through the family system in which they are embedded.

The Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART): development of a survey instrument to assess community resilience.

While building community resilience to disasters is becoming an important strategy in emergency management, this is a new field of research with few available instruments for assessing community resilience. This article describes the development of the Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART) survey instrument. CART is a community intervention designed to enhance community resilience to disasters, in part, by engaging communities in measuring it.

The Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART): an intervention to build community resilience to disasters.

Community resilience has emerged as a construct to support and foster healthy individual, family, and community adaptation to mass casualty incidents. The Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART) is a publicly available theory-based and evidence-informed community intervention designed to enhance community resilience by bringing stakeholders together to address community issues in a process that includes assessment, feedback, planning, and action. Tools include a field-tested community resilience survey and other assessment and analytical instruments.