By Sophie Davies
Nov 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Parents living in deprived areas are at higher risk of feeling lonely due to COVID-19, British royal Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, said on Friday as she unveiled research that also highlighted the pandemic’s impact on women’s mental health.
Loneliness among parents has risen from 38% before the pandemic to 63% today as lockdown curbs cut off friends and family members, said the survey commissioned by The Royal Foundation – the charity of Kate and her husband Prince William.
But in Britain’s most-deprived areas the risk was greater, with 13% of parents saying they often or always felt lonely compared to 5% in better-off parts of the country.
“This year has been a hugely challenging time for us all and there hasn’t been a more important moment to talk about families,” the Duchess, a mother-of-three, said in a video posted on Twitter.
Kate and William have long campaigned to raise awareness of mental health issues.
In what the Duchess called Britain’s biggest-ever study on the early childhood years, the new research included a survey of more than 500,000 people and face-to-face interviews with nearly 4,000. It was conducted by Ipsos MORI between December 2019 and October 2020.
