Implicações da pandemia por Covid-19 no brincar e no funcionamento executivo de crianças dos 6 aos 12 anos

Abstract

Theoretical Background The emergence of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic (known worldwide as COVID-19) has brought changes in numerous spheres of human life, and the long-term impacts on children's development are currently being discussed as a result of the restrictions imposed, namely, the periods of confinement to comply with mandatory social isolation (Golberstein, Wen & Miller, 2020; Larsen, Helland, & Holt,2021). The importance of playing in children's development, which has already been corroborated by several authors, led us to investigate how this atypical period may have conditioned the practice of playing and how an impairment of this practice is related to the performance of executive functioning. Executive functions are a set of cognitive abilities identified in the literature as a predictor of the individual's academic success and future life. From a neuropsychological perspective, this paper proposes to study the relationship between children's routines during confinement and the perception of parents about the executive functioning of their children right after deconfinement. Method A total of 146 children aged 7 to 12 years (M=8.47; SD=1.199) from 10 schools in the municipality of Cascais participated in this study. The routines of children in a context of social deprivation as a result of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic period were measured using a questionnaire developed for this purpose and filled in by the parents. To assess executive functioning, the Portuguese translation of the instrument BRIEF -Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (Gioia et al., 2000) was used, in itsversion for parents (Rodrigues et al., 2015).V Results The results obtained show that most children spent little time playing, with fewer opportunities to be physically active and time spent outdoors. On the other hand, the exposure time to screens turned out to be longer. In the analysis of routines by age groups, it was found that older children spent more time exposed to screens, however,there were no differences in age in terms of the children's executive capacity. Of the individual variables of the analyzed sample, the impact factor that stood out on executivefunctioning was the time spent playing alone during the week, with significant results for the Initiative subscale and the Metacognition Index and General Executive Index, which reveal be influenced by individual variables (age, sex, number of siblings and benefit from the social support system).Discussion The conclusions show that during the confinement there was a natural loss in the children's play routines, falling short of what is internationally recommended, and that the act of playing can contribute to influencing the executive functioning, especially with regard to the capacity for initiative. Reinforcing the appreciation of this practice for the benefit of the development of executive capacity in school-age children, because it is verified that the more children play, the better performance they demonstrate in executive functions, especially with greater capacity to initiate tasks.

Date of Award	20 Dec 2021
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Joana Rodrigues Rato (Supervisor) & Paula Pimentel (Co-Supervisor)