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When Crises Collide: Interacting Effects of Family and Societal Adversities on Children’s Learning Growth

21 January 2026

Children’s learning and development can be disrupted by both family-level problems—such as parental job loss, divorce, or illness—and societal crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. This project investigates how these two types of adversity interact to affect children’s learning progress in Dutch primary schools. Using detailed microdata from Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and longitudinal standardized test data from the pupil monitoring system, it tracks how children’s learning develops over time. The study examines whether societal crises mainly make existing family problems worse, or whether they also create new problems such as parental job loss that harm children’s learning. By focusing on the accumulation of multiple adversities and their impact on learning growth trajectories, this research provides crucial insights into how crises deepen educational inequality, and how schools and policymakers can better protect vulnerable children in times of social and economic disruption.

Photo by Taylor Flowe on Unsplash