Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of children in Bangladesh: A cross-sectional study

COVID-19 pandemic poses a significant mental health threat among children in Bangladesh. This study aims to explore the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of children during the lockdown in Bangladesh. An online cross-sectional study was conducted from 25th April to 9th May 2020 among 384 parents having at least one child aged between 5-15 years using non-probability sampling. K-means clustering used to group children according to mental health score and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) performed to identify the relationship among the parental behavior and child mental health, and also these associations were assessed through chisquare test. Children were classified into four groups where 43% of child had subthreshold mental disturbances (mean Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)-10; 2.8), 30.5% had mild (mean MDD-10; 8.9), 19.3% suffered moderately (mean MDD-10; 15.9), and 7.2% of child suffered from severe disturbances (mean MDD-10; 25.2). The higher percentage of mental health disturbances of children with the higher education level of parents, relative infected by COVID-19 (yes), parents still need to go the workplace (yes), and parent's abnormal behavior but lower to their counterparts. This paper demonstrates large proportions of children are suffering from mental health disturbances in Bangladesh during the period of lockdown. Implementation of psychological intervention strategies and improvement in house-hold financial conditions, literacy of parents, taking care of children, and job security may help in improving the psychological/mental status of children and the authors believe that the findings will be beneficial to accelerate the rate of achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) linked to health status in Bangladesh.