“The Earth Is Becoming a Coronavirus”: Children’s Perceptions, Knowledge, and Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic as Presented in Their Drawings

Younger children's voices are often overlooked in research and policy, yet their perceptions and experiences are crucial in understanding their needs in planning responses to crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing studies on children's experiences of crises often rely on adult perspectives or are adult-led; a more child-centric approach could be to analyze children's drawings. The aim of this study was to explore Swedish 7- to 11-year-old children's experiences and knowledge of the COVID-19 pandemic, as expressed in their drawings. Drawings from <i>N</i> = 454 children with accompanying texts, from various Swedish municipalities with different socio-economic profiles, were analyzed using a combination of semiotic visual analysis and content analysis. Three main themes emerged: (a) <i>Fun, friends, and freedom are cancelled</i> which pointed to societal changes as a result of the pandemic that impacted the children's own lives, causing high levels of frustration; children saw contrasts between what had been, what is, and what is to come; (b) <i>The world is all upside down</i>, in which the children highlighted their understanding of the virus, how it has changed and impacted the world, as well as existential reflections of their lives and surrounding environment; and (c) <i>The Virus: evil, scary, and dangerous, but masks and sanitizer can help</i> showed the children's understanding of the pandemic as a global event and showed high level of health literacy related to COVID-19. Children were very perceptive and astute to the societal issue at hand. Despite Sweden's relatively lenient measures, the pandemic significantly affected their lives and autonomy.