Children's perezhivaniya and agency during the COVID-19 pandemic: Narrative research from China

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the lives of children across the world. To understand these changes, this study explores how 14 Chinese children aged 6 to 12 years old experienced and reacted to the pandemic since its first outbreak in 2020. Applying Vygotsky's conceptualizations of perezhivanie and agency, the author interprets the children's narrative accounts of their thinking and actions during the pandemic. According to the three-dimensional narrative analyses conducted, perezhivaniya commonalities among the participating children include limited physical movement, scarcity of peer interaction, compulsory online learning, reconstruction of family relationships, and noticeable self-growth. Further, the participating children manifested their agency as resisting, exploring, self-control, committing, and envisioning. Different perezhivaniya lead children to manifest different types of agency—a process wherein mediational means play pivotal roles. This study contributes to theoretical discussions of the dialectical relation between perezhivanie and human agency. Moreover, it has practical implications for how adults can support the emergence of children's agency through means of mediation in perezhivaniya.

1. Introduction

In December 2019, a public hospital in Wuhan, China, received several patients in succession who had pulmonary infections. The subsequent rapid increase of infected patients in China and the spread of infection across the globe in early 2020 prompted the World Health Organization (2020) to declare the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak a public health emergency. The rapid spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the lack of an antiviral treatment specifically for it caused massive fear worldwide.

Up to now, the three years of the global fight against COVID-19 have posed numerous challenges across society, particularly for young children. The economic and public health consequences of the crisis continue to threaten their lives and well-being. Some official reports have surveyed the impact of COVID-19 on children's lived experiences (UNICEF, 2020; World Bank, 2021). However, few academic studies have sought to understand children's attitudes, voices, and experiences during the pandemic (Alter, 2022; Mantovani et al., 2021). Prior surveys and studies have regarded children as a vulnerable, disadvantaged group; such studies emphasize that issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder, attachment problems, or a sense of grief can have fundamental and long-term effects on children (Pascal & Bertram, 2021). However, children are not purely victims of the pandemic, nor are they passive bystanders; rather, they are agentive actors who have experienced, engaged in, and responded to this social crisis to sustain public health and personal well-being (Wei, forthcoming). Aligned with the Vygotskian stance on children's development, the present article argues that children in the pandemic-hit environment, “subjecting to [their] will, enter into a new relation with the environment […] by directing and controlling their own behaviour […] and eliciting reactions they desire” (Vygotsky, 1930/1999, p. 63). Accordingly, it is extremely important that we inquire into how children construct their own meanings of the pandemic and how they agentively enact and transform their circumstances during this crisis. To that end, I applied Vygotsky's conceptualizations of “perezhivanie” and “agency” to inquire into children's own meaning-makings of the pandemic, their agency in contributing to personal and collective well-being under the circumstances, and how the global pandemic as a social crisis has influenced the emergence of children's agency (CA).

In analyzing the narrative accounts of the 14 Chinese children (aged 6–12), this study is guided by the following questions: (1) What are the details of participating children's perezhivaniya (CP) during the COVID-19 pandemic? (2) How do these children manifest their agency during the pandemic? (3) How do CP lead to the emergence of their agency? The study is theoretically significant in that it discusses the dialectical relation between perezhivanie and agency. Moreover, it suggests practical implications for adults, such as parents and educators, in terms of how they can support the emergence of CA through mediational means. Listening to children talk about their experiences during the pandemic, responding to their needs, and understanding the relevant implications is a step toward an inclusive and democratic society.

2. Theoretical conceptualizations

2.1. Perezhivanie

Perezhivanie (the Russian word Переживание; perezhivaniya, plural) is one of the key concepts in Vygotsky's theory and is closely related to other theoretical concepts he developed, including higher mental functions, zone of proximal development, and psychological equilibrium. “An experience” or “an experiencing” are seen as appropriate English translations of perezhivanie (Vasilyuk, 1984/1988). However, perezhivanie is not just any type of experience; not all everyday experiences can function as perezhivaniya. Vygotsky (1934/1994) emphasized the complexity and holism of a perezhivanie, and he positioned the concept as the link between one's mental state and reality. “In a perezhivanie, we are always dealing with an indivisible unity of personal characteristics and situational characteristics.” (Vygotsky, 1934/1994, p. 342) Furthermore, Vygotsky interpreted perezhivanie as lived emotional experience, as how one “becomes aware of, interprets, [and] emotionally relates to a certain event” (Vygotsky, 1934/1994, p. 341). Thus, perezhivanie is not only a unit of environmental characteristics and personal features but also a unity of emotions and intellect (Ng & Renshaw, 2019; Smagorinsky, 2011), in which the “full vitality of life” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 50) gets expressed.

In recent decades, activity theory researchers studying children worldwide have increasingly given their attention to the concept of perezhivanie (e.g., Fleer & Hammer, 2013; Ng & Renshaw, 2019; Smagorinsky, 2011); this is mainly the result of increased interest in topics such as children's emotion, motivation, and identity within the cultural-historical approach. As Veresov and Fleer (2016) argue, perezhivanie productively contributes to the study of children's development, helping us understand that our own arguments must also be viewed from the child's perspective. This places children's agentic role—making sense of the development of their social situation—at the psychological forefront. Focusing on “a dynamic tension between the given world and the way in which it is experienced” (Salmi & Kumpulainen, 2019, p. 59), perezhivanie captures children's subjective meaning-making of their environment. Through their perezhivaniya, children realize the influences of their environments and social situations by attaching subjective meaning to circumstances. Children, as agentive actors, make and remake their perezhivaniya through their life projects, the projects they commit themselves to, and those they are destined to experience, which fashions their lifelong development.

In this study, perezhivanie is used to examine Chinese children's emotional and intellectual experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, which draws attention to children's awareness of changes to the environment and the perezhivaniya are the children's unique sense-making of these changes. Perezhivanie is the prism that best represents the refracted relationship between the children and pandemic-induced circumstances; however, across different children's individualized perezhivaniya, there may exist commonalities as the meanings produced through social activities and interactions within a certain historicity and social situation. Only if we discover the commonalities of CP across different experiences, we find the formation of collective memory (Wertsch, 2008) as mediational means for the future development of children.

2.2. Children's agency

CA is presently the focus of widespread interest in child-related research (e.g., Esser et al., 2016). A review article by Varpanen (2019) reveals that studies on CA offer theoretical resources in six main areas: new sociology of childhood, cultural-historical theory, post-structuralist theory, psychology, the capabilities approach, and American pragmatism. The present article focuses on the issues at hand through the conceptual lenses of the cultural-historical approach (e.g., Edwards, 2005; Hopwood et al., 2022; Kumpulainen et al., 2014; Ma et al., 2022; Rainio, 2008; Sairanen et al., 2020).

The cultural-historical approach has roots in Marxist developmental psychology and, more specifically, in the works of Vygotsky, who considered participation in cultural practices to be the primary motor of child development (Kim & Roth, 2016). In the cultural-historical approach, children's development is understood as a mediated process situated within and across daily activities (Vygotsky, 1978). Going beyond individualistic approaches to agency, the cultural-historical approach does not regard agency as a sense or a fixed capacity. On the contrary, the cultural-historical approach offers the means of conceptualizing agency in non-dualist ways while emphasizing the crucial roles of conflicting motives and a mechanism mediated by instrumentality (Sannino, 2015). In the cultural-historical research tradition, the agency is conceptualized as an ongoing process that is contextually and historically situated, occasional, multi-faceted, relational, and transitory (Edwards, 2005; Wei, forthcoming).

Along these lines, this article views CA as a continuous, non-linear, and tension-laden process, always rooted in the socio-material and historical context of concrete actions. Typically, CA is developed and sustained in interactions between individual children and collectives (e.g., children's parents and peers) over time. However, the locus of the agency is to be found in children's initiatives and in how they evolve in their interactions with others and the relevant cultural-historical context. Thus, for children, agency is a relational achievement that creates opportunities for them not only to copy or repeat activities but also to transform activities and even create new ones and to contribute to their own development with unexpected outcomes (Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2019; Kumpulainen & Lipponen, 2010).

In reacting and transforming their circumstances and themselves, children can powerfully manifest their agency through narratives that break away from a given frame of action. During the global crisis of COVID-19, CA, despite having no direct influence on the fight against the pandemic, contributes to the renewal of public life as it is understood in terms of a transformative, activist stance (Stetsenko, 2020). In this respect, the pandemic has created natural conditions that can serve as a laboratory from which to illustrate children's efforts to go beyond their customary activities and engage in activities for the common good. CA, in this study, transcends social crises, and children engaging in the making of a better future becomes more powerfully apparent than in less challenging times (Wei, forthcoming).

3. Study design

3.1. Context

The study draws on a large ongoing research project conducted in Mainland China since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. In early 2020, the Ministry of Education (2020) in China initiated the “school-suspended-but-learning-continues” policy to support the continuous learning and development of preschool children (3–6 years old), primary school children (6–12 years old), and secondary school children (12–18 years old). Our project has been to study Chinese children's life experiences in the COVID-19 era in this context (Guo & Wei, 2021; Li & Wei, 2022; Wei, forthcoming).

Connections with Chinese children were made with the help of my research assistants who published announcements to recruit participants. With a brief introduction of the aims, content, and form of the project, the announcements were posted on the Chinese social media platform WeChat. No exclusion criteria were adopted, and the only inclusion criterion was that they were willing to share their experiences during the pandemic. A total of 14 primary school children from 8 provinces responded to the announcements and then participated in the study (Table 1 ).

Table 1.

Information of the participants (N = 14).

Name	Age	Gender	Place of residence
Chen	12	F	A rural town in Hebei
Chu	11	F	The capital city of Beijing
Dou	11	M	An urban city in Hebei
Juan	8	F	An urban city in Shandong
Le	11	M	An urban city in Shanxi
Liang	9	M	An urban city in Hunan
Mao	8	F	An urban city in Henan
Ming	7	F	An urban city in Henan
Nan	12	M	A rural town in Jiangsu
Song	12	M	An urban city in Sichuan
Tao	11	M	The capital city of Beijing
Xiao	12	M	The capital city of Beijing
Xin	11	F	A rural town in Shandong
Xuan	6	F	The capital city of Beijing

This study was approved by the Sunglory Educational Institute, the NGO that provided financial support for the study, and the Research Ethics Board of the university where the author works. Informed consent was obtained from both the 14 children and their parents. All participants agreed to have the details of their experiences published for an international readership; their identities are protected by the use of pseudonyms.

3.2. Data collection

This study on children's experiences uses participating children's narratives as empirical sources through which to investigate CP and reflect on emergent mechanisms of agency formation in times of crisis. Increasingly, as a historical storytelling practice, the narrative method has become an alternative and a complement to the scientific method in terms of understanding human experiences (Bruner, 1986). Stories are translations of disordered real-world observations organized into communicative units. Narratives shape ideas that allow us to engage in ongoing dialogue with and about reality and the means to transform it (Bruner, 2002).

The rationale for using narratives as raw data is that children are naturally drawn to stories because stories help them organize their thoughts and make them more understandable to themselves and others. Stories help children understand complex ideas because they are often “about problems, dilemmas, contradictions and imbalances” (Gonzalez-Monteagudo, 2011, p. 298) that can help children navigate their agentive actions. By telling and retelling stories, children negotiate the places they inhabit or imagine themselves inhabiting their future activities.

The main method of collecting children's narratives was through interviews. The interview questions were designed based on children's experiences at three dimensions: during different periods of the pandemic, in their different activity spaces, and in their different interactions with the important people in their lives; these levels correspond to the three dimensions of narrative research: temporality, spatiality, and sociality (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). For example, the following questions were included:

• •“What have you been doing during the COVID-19 pandemic?”
• •“What has changed in your daily life compared to pre-pandemic times?”
• •“How do you feel about these changes in your life?”
• •“What have you missed?”
• •“What has worried you?”
• •“What has coming back to school been like for you?”
• •“What do you think the future holds?”

For safety reasons, all the interviews were conducted online through WeChat. In an attempt to avoid the limitations of distance interviews, I adopted a policy of interviewing each child several times. From February 2020 to February 2022, my assistants and I interviewed each child at least three times, and each session lasted almost 30 min. Conducting multiple longitudinal interviews aligns with Hedegaard and Fleer's (2008) emphasis on “the interview as more than questions and answers, but rather as shared knowledge construction and deconstruction while dialoguing” (p. 140). In total, 31.5 h of interviews were audiotaped. All data were transcribed verbatim in Chinese and then translated into English by a professional service.

3.3. Data analysis

This study applied the abovementioned three dimensions—temporality, spatiality, and sociality—to analyze the narratives (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Temporality involves considering the past, present, and future of the children's lives. Spatiality refers to the specific situations in their worlds. Regarding sociality, a transcript or text on the personal experience of a child and their interaction with other people is analyzed. This analytical method thus unfurls along a past–present–future continuum (temporality), unfolds in unique contexts (spatiality), and focuses on human interactions (sociality) (Table 2 ).

Table 2.

The three-dimensional analysis on children's narrative accounts.

Three dimensions		Descriptions	Examples
Temporality	Past	Looking backward to remembered experiences, feelings, and stories from earlier times	“Before the pandemic, it was the most natural thing to be running in the back yard at school and playing basketball.” (Le, 11-year-old boy)
	Present	Looking at current experiences, feelings, and stories relating to actions of an event	“During the pandemic, my parents stopped taking me to the park. I wanted to go outside to play, but I knew I couldn't.” (Mao, 8-year-old girl)
	Future	Looking forward to implied and possible experiences, and plot lines	“I learned the new skills of making fried rice with eggs. I want to try my hand at making fried rice with eggs for my parents, which will make me feel very successful.” (Liang, 9-year-old boy)
Spatiality		Looking at context, place and time situated in a physical landscape or setting with spatial boundaries with actors’ intentions, purposes, and different points of view	“At school, I can do everything on my own. When I study at home, I felt that my mom was monitoring me.” (Chu, 11-year-old girl)
Sociality	Personal	Looking inward to internal conditions, feelings, hopes, aesthetic reactions, and moral dispositions	“I don't want to go to a bad middle school. I have to spare no effort in studying well now, even though I have to study at home.” (Xiao, 12-year-old boy)
	Social	Looking outward to existential conditions in the environment with other people and their intentions, purposes, assumptions and points of view	“Although the epidemic has blocked face-to-face communication, we’ve built a new mode of peer communication–network communication that relies on the Internet.” (Song, 12-year-old boy)

Clandinin and Connelly (2000) suggested a complex, three-step process for analyzing narratives through the three-dimensional approach; the process was applied in the present study as follows. In the first step, by reading and rereading the interview transcriptions while considering temporality, I depicted the participating children's life experiences before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic as a plotline to seek out the continuities among the CP. In the second step, I turned the analytic focus toward the children's specific situations through their personal stories and the landscape of the circumstances they live in. I described the children's activities in various spaces (e.g., school, family, and community) with situatedness. Finally, I looked at how the children constructed more diverse and fruitful story constellations through their individual reflections and through the social interactions they have with other people (e.g., parents and peers) who are important to them, which involved collaborating, negotiating, and renegotiating ideas and actions.

To distill participating children's perezhivanie and CA, data analysis was particularly focused on the tensions participants conveyed in their descriptions and the themes that emerged from their narratives. As the results indicate, the 14 Chinese children's narrative accounts shared common themes in terms of the theoretical discussion of the dialectical relation between CP and their agency.

3.4. Reflexivity of the researcher

As a narrative inquirer, it is necessary to reflect on this study's role in raising the children's awareness of changes and their agency. Aligned with Engeström (2013), I agree that “all research intervenes. When we observe, analyze and interpret social life, we also influence it, whether we want to or not.” (p. xvii) I am a relational inquirer attentive to the intersubjectivity and embedded spaces in which narratives are storied. In this study, the children were living and reliving in their perezhivaniya by telling and retelling their stories (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Acknowledging the research project's impact on the children, it does not impede the trustworthiness of the study. Before I submitted this article for publication, all participants and their parents reviewed it and approved my analyses, strengthening the study's credibility and ethical status.

4. Findings

According to the research questions, this section is structured into three sub-parts to examine the Chinese CP, their agency, and the relationship between them under the circumstance of the COVID-19 pandemic as a social crisis.

4.1. Commonalities of children's perezhivaniya during the COVID-19 pandemic

Social crisis can lead to complex perezhivaniya among the people it impacts (Vasilyuk, 1984/1988). During the interviews, the 14 Chinese children established themselves as young people who can identify critical experiences in their lives and who can also position themselves dominantly as having the competencies to engage in various practices. Furthermore, their perspectives entailed salient understandings of the conflictual and contested nature embedded in the pandemic. The participating Chinese children manifested their meaning-making on the widespread and life-threatening pandemic as five major aspects of perezhivanie.

Limited physical movement is the perezhivanie most frequently mentioned among children. The unique context strongly contributes to the children's first lockdown experience. Le (11 years old), for instance, complained that “COVID-19 made the most common things (e.g., running in the back yard at school) impossible.” Moreover, interpersonal interaction has been altered through individuals' cautious measures of self-protection against the virus, as Mao (8 years old) “was stopped being taken to the park by parents.”

Scarcity of peer interaction is the second type of perezhivanie revealed in the children's narratives. Due to the highly contagious nature of the virus and relevant precautions, most of the interviewed children reported having “had little opportunity to interact and play with [their] peers,” as told by Song (12 years old). On the temporal continuum, the children tend to compare their life experiences before and after the outbreak of COVID-19. Juan (8 years old) was disappointed that she “had less encouragement from [her] teachers than before.”

Compulsory online learning, the third type of perezhivanie, is focused on the spatial transition to at-home learning. During the peak of the pandemic, with 180 million Chinese children forced to stay home, the Chinese government and education policymakers worked to ensure that classes continued. However, online learning on the largest scale in history was met with more than a few challenges. For example, Tao (11 years old) said he was “easily distracted during online learning due to the unstable Internet connection.” Moreover, learning at home renders some children, like Xiao (12 years old), unable to “talk with peers as usual face to face.”

During the lockdown period, the reconstruction of family relationships was a focus within family members' sociality. Children had to spend long periods with their parents, who were, however, regarded by Chen (12 years old) as “monitoring and disciplining [his] learning.” Parents' laboriousness also roused their children's sympathy. Dou (11 years old) said he “would not take the housework her parents do for granted.”

In relation to their noticeable self-growth during the pandemic, the children talked about the changes and development they underwent. Although some children expressed having had a negative experience, others felt that the public health crisis facilitated their maturing; for example, Xin (11 years old) formed health literacy for “protecting self and family members,” and Liang (9 years old) learned “making handy cuisines which developed [her] capacity of independent living in future.”

4.2. Manifestations of children's agency during the COVID-19 pandemic

Children experience the pandemic not only emotionally and intellectually, but also in reaction to their perezhivaniya sustaining public health and personal well-being as their motives. During the analysis of the interviews, I identified five different aspects of CA.

Resisting the threat from the virus and violations of epidemic prevention regulations by others during the crisis of the pandemic is the first enactment of agency. For instance, Xuan (6 years old) “changed masks at least three times daily to protect self and others.” Similarly, Nan (12 years old) actively worked as a young volunteer in his community to “remind residents to take masks.”

Second, when their life situations are constrained, children also tend to explore leisure activities amidst the intense atmosphere. Digital games afford children a visual world they can use to expand their life boundaries. For example, Song (12 years old) “built a new mode of peer communication—network communication that relies on the Internet,” and Le (11 years old) legitimized his online game playing “as a form of self-relief.” The Internet, as a tool, conforms to the open state promoted by children's curiosity and can bring them emotional release.

Self-control is the third type of agency the children manifested. According to Vygotsky (1978), self-control is a high level of mental functioning that “permits human beings to master their own behaviour” (p. 73). For example, Xiao (12 years old) “was strict with his learning as he wants to get a high score on the graduation exam.” Similarly, Tao (11 years old) “could finish [his] homework without supervision.” In other words, children develop their agentive actions in learning and living to redefine situations and control their own actions.

When children perform agentive acts as members of a community to master their joint actions in transforming the contexts, it is called committing. The COVID-19 pandemic drove parents and children to spend a long time together, creating a need to adapt family relationships within the family unit to the new situation. Xin (11 years old) “get[s] [her] family's praise by cooking delicious food with [her] aunt,” while Dou (11 years old) gained enlightenment from the crisis that “everyone in this society has their own responsibility. [I] have to do my own part as well.”

Finally, envisioning is a future-oriented agency by which children express their wishes for society and themselves. It is evident from the narratives that all participants dreamed of the coronavirus disappearing from their daily lives. Meanwhile, Song (12 years old) knew that as a primary school student, he could not do much more than study well. He and his classmates “made great progress in the monthly exam.” In addition, children envision through expressions of gratitude. For example, Ming (7 years old) showed medical workers how much she appreciated them and offered them her best wishes “by making a picture book to depict medical workers as heroes.”

4.3. Emergence of agency in children's perezhivaniya

These synthesized analyses of CP and CA direct us to the last research question: How do CP lead to their agency? In this section, I present the narrative accounts of two children, Chu and Ming, by elaborating on the nuanced dialectics of CP and CA across time, space, and sociality.

4.3.1. Chu's narratives

Chu was 11 years old at the time of the interview. A dance student, she was enrolled in the Beijing Dance Academy when she was only five years old. In China, children who want to be professional dancers need to attend a professional school. Chu studied at the primary school affiliated with the Beijing Dance Academy. Before the pandemic, Chu lived at the school and went home on weekends. She was clearly excited when we talked about her life at school:

At school, I can do everything on my own. I like staying with my classmates. We run from one classroom to another together; we go shopping at the supermarket on campus; we chat and fix each other's hair. Life is different from when I was very young. There is no discipline from parents.

When the pandemic hit, Chu's life changed radically. From February to May 2020, she had to stay home with her parents (CP1: limited physical movement)—no peers, no teachers, only her parents and their discipline (CP2: scarcity of peer interaction). Chu complained about the beginning of her homeschooling (CP3: compulsory online learning):

When I study at home, my mom listens to my teachers' comments about me. One time, my mom asked me why the teacher didn't praise me. I felt that my mom was monitoring me. At home, she regulated, instructed, and pushed me to study more.

(CA1: resisting)

One day, Chu and her mother quarreled because her mother accused her of having a lazy attitude toward her lessons. Chu's mother had found Chu playing on her smartphone while she was doing exercises for a dance (CA2: exploring). Chu told us that her mother shouted angrily, “We paid a lot for your dancing. If you don't want to learn, well, abandon it then!” Chu cried during the interview and reflected on her situation at home:

My mom worried about me falling behind. She wanted to instruct me in dance, but she doesn't know how. So, she has resigned herself to pushing me and monitoring my practice. Although my mom's words hurt me, I understand her intention. When I was at school, my mom sent me homemade food almost every day, to help me keep up with my diet. I know my parents are industrious.

(CP4: reconstruction of family relationships)

Chu's words indicate that the lockdown increased tensions between herself and her parents. Nonetheless, staying at home also allowed Chu to better understand her parents' industriousness in their work and their contributions to the home and family (CP5: noticeable self-growth). Before the pandemic, Chu barely realized the sacrifices her parents made so that she could study. When she realized how much effort her parents, especially her mother, put in at home, she began to reconstrue her own role as a part of the family and as a contributor to the well-being of everyone. (CA4: committing)

I am not a little girl anymore. I should be sympathetic to my parents' laboriousness. I can't live up to my parents' expectations. Practice makes perfect!

(CA3: self-control)

One day, Chu's parents planned to make dumplings for lunch. Previously, Chu had waited for the dumplings to be ready, even though making dumplings is a traditional activity in Chinese families that all members typically participate in and enjoy. Surprisingly, Chu asked to actively participate in making the dumplings that day. By observing her parents' industriousness, she became a more responsible contributor to the family. Chu's mother was happy to see Chu maturing. (CA5: envisioning).

4.3.2. Ming's narratives

Ming was a seven-year-old girl living in a northern province of China at the time of the interview. During the lockdown, while staying at home, she was concerned with the unpredictable progression of the pandemic (CP1: limited physical movement). One day, Ming was watching television (CP2: scarcity of peer interaction) and saw the 80-year-old doctor and scientist Zhong Nanshan going to Wuhan. During the first peak of the pandemic, Wuhan City had the most severe COVID-19 situation. Seeing Zhong's self-sacrifice and dauntless spirit, Ming said:

I am so touched by the news. Grandpa Zhong protects us in the crisis without considering his own life and safety.

(CP5: noticeable self-growth)

At the same time, Ming's mother engaged in similar initiatives for collective well-being. Her mother worked as a volunteer in their community to check residents' body temperature daily, which touched Ming's heart:

My mom is not only mine; she is a member of this community. (CP4: reconstruction of family relationships) In the COVID-19 pandemic, all of us are fighting the virus. We cannot stay out of the fight. (CA1: resisting) Many people make contributions quietly and do not seek any recognition. I think their actions deserve to be emulated.

One day, Ming's class teacher organized an online meeting devoted “To Heroes!” (CP3: compulsory online learning) The teacher encouraged the students to design creative works to express their gratitude to, respect for, and admiration for those working on the frontline. Ming realized that she could finally contribute. She said:

I was so excited when I got this assignment. I think it is a good chance to express and present my gratitude. We call them heroes because they protect the country with their sacrifice. I have to thank them for what they do.

(CA4: committing)

When Ming's classmates planned to write thank you letters to the heroes, Ming decided to do something different (Fig. 1 ). (CA2: exploring)

Fig. 1.

Ming's picture book: “To Heroes!”

Many of my peers wrote letters. I wanted to find a more creative way. How about a picture book? I usually read them; they are vivid and attractive. I drew a picture book with 10 pages, in which doctors, scientists, police personnel, and volunteers are all included (CA3: self-control). On the last page, I drew a little white rabbit with a red scarf. The rabbit is me, and she says, “To Heroes!” (CA5: envisioning)

Summing up Chu's and Ming's stories, the COVID-19 pandemic changed their living situation from one of freedom to one wherein they were constrained. Studying at home made them observe their parents' work and their salient contributions to the family and the community. The clash between Chu and her mother, the touching episode from the TV program for Ming, elicited both Chu's and Ming's profound perezhivaniya and their subsequent actions toward making changes. In this circumstance, the process of Chu's agency involved gaining a deeper understanding of her parents and actively involving herself in the collective work of the family, while Ming's agency mainly manifested as expressing gratitude to the heroes by drawing a picture book. Both cases show CP and their agency intertwined with each other, although there is no fixed pattern of perezhivanie-agency relation. Furthermore, CA emerged in their perezhivaniya by mediational means (e.g., the supervision of Chu's mother, and the guidance of Ming's teacher). It implies that perezhivaniya are not private, idiosyncratic moments. Rather, they are socialized experiences brought into the social world through processes of using mediational means and then communicating it to others. In this line, CA is also thoroughly socialized instead of an idiosyncratic form of action. Children, therefore, exercise their agency through mediational means including adults' support.

5. Discussion

This article, based on the fine-grained narratives of the 14 participating Chinese children, discusses the dialectical relation between perezhivanie and human agency. Moreover, these children's experiences and actions have practical implications for how adults can support the emergence of CA in social crises.

5.1. Dialectical relation between children's perezhivaniya and agency

This study examines Chinese children's experiences with and reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Perezhivanie, as a conceptual tool, is used to depict the 14 children's life-worlds, which resonates with Vygotsky's (1998) claims regarding the impact of environment on children's development: “The environment determines the development of the child through perezhivanie […] the child is a part of the social situation, and the relation of the child to the environment and the environment to the child occurs through perezhivanie […] [and] the forces of the environment acquire a controlling significance” (p. 294). The COVID-19 pandemic, which represents a major societal change, has created new conditions for children that may be dramatic and may lead to development (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013). During the pandemic, restricted physical movement rapidly compressed peer interaction, and newly compulsory online learning became an unprecedented experience in their lives. Further, children's re-understanding of parenting and noticeable self-growth were revealed through recounting of their unique experiences in those circumstances. These five types of perezhivaniya confirm that development is a complex dialectical process of the social becoming the individual (Veresov & Fleer, 2016); however, the developing individual is always a part of their social situation, and the relation of the individual to the environment and the environment to the individual occurs through the commonalities across perezhivaniya.

However, the restrained situation children found themselves in during the pandemic did not diminish their needs for human interaction and self-expression, natural instincts that are crucial to their well-being. To understand how children make sense of their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic and how they endeavor to change their lives, we must understand the dynamics of agency. The present analyses of children's narratives reveal a range of activities that children talk into being in relation to their agency, through which they attempt to transcend the status quo, breach the social order, and take concrete steps toward futures other than those that appear to be given (Gutiérrez et al., 2019). Aligned with Ng and Renshaw's observations (2019), children manifest their agency as perezhivaniya in the conflicts, disturbances, and contradictions in their life experiences. The 14 Chinese children manifested five agentive enactments in their narrative accounts: resisting, exploring, self-control, committing, and envisioning. The present findings support Rainio's (2008) argument that children manifest their agency as self-change, responsible group membership, and resistance. In the present study, exploring and envisioning newly emerging categories of CA, help us understand the new forms that children's agentive actions can take. In addition, unlike Haapasaari et al.'s (2016) study, this study finds differences between children and adults' agency here. CA can be differentiated from adults' “criticizing the current situation” or “explicating a new possibility” (Haapasaari et al., 2016, p. 236), as their early age and limited resources cannot support their taking “consequential actions” under these circumstances (Haapasaari et al., 2016, p. 236). This article thus speaks to how important it is to develop a holistic understanding of how children experience external circumstances and be open to the potential novelty of their perspectives (Hedegaard et al., 2012).

On the basis of Chu's and Ming's fine-grained narrative accounts, the inner dynamics between perezhivanie and agency were further investigated. From the theoretical perspective, the present findings suggest that we need to revisit Vygotsky's claims regarding the dialectical development process of children in social crisis. Vygotsky's writing draws attention to the roles and the concepts of perezhivanie and human agency and their places in understanding the dialectical character of human development (Vygotsky, 1998). Perezhivanie was intrinsically associated with motivational processes at the beginning of Vygotsky's work (Rey, 2016). Perezhivanie, as “experiencing-by-struggling,” is the work that, when “faced with an existentially impossible situation, the person conducts to regain psychological equilibrium” (Vasilyuk, 1984/1988, pp. 18–19), while agency, which involves the production of possible futures (Gutiérrez et al., 2019), is a process through which children intentionally react and transform themselves and their current life situations (Wei, forthcoming). Conceptualizing agency alongside perezhivanie allows us to investigate how certain social situations become social development situations.

Through the cultural-historical approach, we retain the pivotal role of human agency while avoiding dualistic traps (Cole et al., 2019; Engeström & Sannino, 2021). CP and CA are dialectically intertwined and grounded in Marxist epistemology (Ilyenkov, 1982). The cultural-historical approach is used to explore “the adaptive and innovative opportunities that [children] create through agentic projects with each other and the natural world, rather than as against each other and the world” (Cole et al., 2019, p. 283). In this line, agency is not a property of individuals but emerges in materially mediated social interaction, enabled and constrained by societal and material structures (Hopwood et al., 2022; Sannino, 2015). By sharing these ideas, children are not only able to obtain and understand their perezhivaniya but are also, through their agency, able to contribute to and even change the activities that take place in these settings. In this study, we can clearly see that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the participating Chinese children used mediational means to deliver their agency and then reconstruct their perezhivaniya. For example, their ideas about drawing a picture book for medical workers (e.g., Ming), making dumplings with parents (e.g., Chu), and playing digital games to release anxiety (e.g., Song) illustrate that the children adopted instrumentality as mediation to achieve continuity between the perezhivaniya they encountered and the agency they enacted. This aligns with Ma et al.'s (2022) and van Oers's (2012) arguments that children can creatively construct new tools and invent new goals with a certain level of autonomy. Thereby, the dialectical relation between perezhivaniya and agency should be clarified as matters of mediation through which children make personalized meanings and adopt concrete instruments in shared circumstances.

5.2. Practical implications for supporting children's agency in social crisis

Finally, the present findings have some practical implications that could be reflected in adults' practice to construct circumstances that are more inclusive and supportive of children's development during social crises (e.g., Ma et al., 2022; van Oers, 2012). Prior research has called attention to how little space children are given to express, reflect, and develop their own perspectives on their engagement in life (Mantovani et al., 2021). Especially in China and other East Asian countries that are dominated by Confucianism, parental control and the authoritarian parenting style have led to the subordinate status of children in the adult world (Chao, 1994). In this study, Chen and Chu's narratives, for example, exemplify the common disciplinarian parenting style among Chinese families, wherein children hold unequal status. However, parents and educators should critically reflect on their authoritative roles when raising or managing children in a social crisis. If we intend to allow our children to express themselves and gain relief from the crisis, it is necessary to put away authoritarian parenting, listen to their voices, and respect their agentive actions. We strongly believe that young children, who are at formative stages in their lives and in their growing civic awareness, have equally valid knowledge, views, and feelings about the pandemic, which they are capable of expressing if given the opportunity (Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2019; Sairanen et al., 2020). They have powerful and specific narratives about how they have been and are being affected by the COVID-19 lockdowns and the subsequent gradual opening up of public spaces and places; such narratives deserve serious consideration and constitute important evidence that can inform policy responses regarding early care provision and policy (Alter, 2022). Giving children the opportunity to express and document their lived experiences and felt realities can enable them to process these feelings and thus have greater confidence in participating in community life.

Furthermore, among the 14 Chinese children's narrative accounts, it seems that perezhivanie cannot simply lead to agency without the support of others. Referred to as “the intellectualization of emotions” (Rey, 2016, p. 308), CP needs support from their parents or educators, who listen to children's pandemic stories and help them figure out how to rationally interpret their experiences. As argued by Veresov and Fleer (2016), during perezhivanie, children normally need the aid of adults who are capable of objectifying and reflecting their feelings, guiding them, helping them make use of cultural resources, and locating any necessary accommodations they might need for their new situation. The present study suggests that children can generate agency when parents, teachers, and other adults understand their needs, encourage them to express themselves, and invite them to join in collective work. This corresponds to Sairanen et al.'s (2020) argument that parents and educators should be attentive and sensitive to children's initiations and responses to them.

Moreover, in the post-pandemic era, the new normal of children's education should not only be understood as merely resuming the operation of schools but also as creatively integrating spaces, time, people, and technologies into a supportive child development system, wherein more personalized strategies can be made available to children for their engagement. Moreover, more articulated partnerships should be built among families, schools, and communities to better support children in expressing their COVID-19 pandemic narratives and, through this, promote their well-being. In so doing, we can help make it possible for children to undergo significant changes and realize futures that were otherwise deemed out of reach (Salmi & Kumpulainen, 2019).

6. Conclusion

This article contributes theoretical reflection upon which to analyze CP and CA through abundant empirical data from China. In the context of the pandemic disaster, the perezhivaniya of children's lives are visible in five main domains—physical movement, peer relations, online learning, family membership, and self-growth. These domains constitute the multiple facets of children's lives, which may have lifelong influence during and beyond social crises. The variety of emotional and intellectual aspects of these perezhivaniya can engender children's agentive actions, through which they react to and even transform their circumstances and themselves.

These five kinds of agency—resisting, exploring, self-control, committing, and envisioning—are summarized here and form a novel framework within which CA during a social crisis can be analyzed. Applying the cultural-historical approach from a dialectical perspective illustrates how CP renders CA emergent and how children express their agency using instruments as means of mediation. This approach sheds light on children's education, indicating that adults, including parents and educators, should understand children's specific needs and the expressions they use in crisis situations. Positive interactions that include responsive conversations and children-initiated everyday activities carried out with adult guidance can encourage children to deepen their agency. Moreover, creating a more supportive ecosystem can empower children with lifelong well-being.

In terms of the study's limitations and future research agenda, the sample size should be expanded to include children in early childhood and older children. In addition, more transnational studies are needed to make a cross-cultural comparison regarding CP and CA. Further, more empirical case studies with marginalized and disadvantaged children willing to describe their life experiences during the pandemic should be conducted to build an inclusive dialogue.

Funding source

This work was supported by the Sunglory Educational Institute, Grant No. SEI-QXZ-2020-25 and Capital Normal University, Grant No. 21530420006.

Declaration of competing interest

None.

Data availability

The data that has been used is confidential.