Back to ‘Normality’?
Life during the pandemic
The last ‘normal’ school year children experienced was three years ago. Everything they knew was disrupted. They missed seeing their families. They missed going to school. Their relationships suffered and they forgot how to play and socialise.
The littlest ones didn’t go to playgroups. They didn’t splash around in a swimming pool. Their grandparents couldn't care for them. Masks shielded them from the virus but stopped them learning communication skills by seeing other peoples’ facial expressions and learning what emotions they represent. They couldn’t play alongside each other, couldn’t learn how to collaborate, share and take turns.
Children that entered secondary school this September did so having missed the ‘benchmarks’ that normally mark this milestone and help them transition successfully. Last year’s cohort didn’t even finish primary school. Residential trips, swimming lessons, plays and farewell discos - too risky. After moving from being the biggest fish in a small pond to the littlest fish in a big pond, some of them still present socially, emotionally and academically as the younger children they were when school was last normal.
And the older ones? This summer, adolescents will sit public exams, just as generations before them have done… but this year, some of them do this having never before entered an exam hall or sat under formal conditions.
No wonder our children are stressed.
Mental health crisis
Our new normal is a mental health crisis. Child mental health statistics and research bear this out: in May 2021, Young Minds published results of a survey of nearly two thousand parents and carers, 67% of whom expressed concern about the long-term impact of the pandemic on their child’s mental health, with 66% expressing a negative impact on their own mental health. More recently, The Coalition for Youth Mental Health in Schools called for a radical reform of how mental health services are delivered in educational settings. They surveyed over a thousand young people and found that almost two thirds felt anxious and worried more frequently than they did before the Covid crisis.
Rates of anxiety and depression among children and young people are unacceptably high, and their effects are pervasive and long-term, continuing beyond childhood into adulthood and impacting on the kinds of lives and futures that children can have. It is clear that the ‘one size fits all’ approach doesn’t actually fit everyone.
The pandemic led some adults to become anxious or depressed for the very first time, while others with pre-existing mental health conditions found that these increased due to new stresses, demands and uncertainty, with a greater impact on them as well as on other members of their families, including their children. As parents, if we are not okay, our kids are not okay. And as well as this, as the old saying goes, a parent is only as happy as their unhappiest child.
Instinctively, as parents in the post-pandemic phase, we want to do everything possible to make sure that our children haven’t been too badly disadvantaged by its effects. But beware - sometimes what we think is in the best interests of our children actually does more harm to them than good. In her book “Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World,” Madeline Levine warns that a parenting style focusing on academic attainment, combined with a drive to shelter children from sadness, discomfort and anxiety, is actually setting up future generations to fail rather than help them make up for lost learning.
Six top tips to help children transition back to school after Covid:
See the pandemic as an opportunity to rethink the paradigms we used to cling on to. A chance to rethink how we have lived our lives, and how we want to live our lives. Talk to your children about how they can make their own way and be the person they are meant to be. Show them.
Listen to your child. Be curious. When you ask them about school, don’t focus on their performance or test results, keep in mind that school performance isn’t everything. A whole lot of other things matter for children to have good lives. Ask them what friends they were with, something funny that happened, how it felt to do something new for the first time. Listen to what they say and keep your own anxiety under control.
Learn to live with the child you have, not try to make them into the child you want. Rethink your understanding of what they ‘should’ be doing. Increase their confidence by taking pleasure in what your child enjoys and is good at and focus more on what is going well than what isn’t.
Remember that children develop at different rates and in different ways, but most will get there in the end. ‘One size fits all’ is not true.
Teach children the skills they need to live in a tumultuous world. Help them to develop their growth mindset. Help them to be flexible, mentally agile and curious. How to collaborate and to tolerate failure. How to be resilient, optimistic and to have hope. These skills are not set in stone at birth. They can all be taught through modelling, through experiences, through conversations.
Monitor your own behaviour and actively shift your mindset from anxiety to curiosity. Promoting hyper-vigilance and micro-parenting makes our children risk averse. Building family resilience, supporting young people by enabling them to take risks and experience failure, is key. Switch from phrases such as “are you okay?”, “be careful” or “watch out” to “you can do this,” “be brave” and “go for it!”
We’re not through the pandemic yet, and nobody knows when we might be. But what is crystal clear is that we have to help ourselves and our children to prioritise and future proof wellbeing and mental health so that they can be prepared for whatever comes next. And who knows what that will be?
