Helping Families Manage Fears and Stress Surrounding COVID-19 April J Remfrey, MS It has always been part of our strategic family plan that our daughter would have a multicultural upbringing, far from the homogeneous small U.S. town where I spent my childhood. When she was eight years old, we decided to move from the U.S. to a community in Switzerland with extensive ethnic and language diversity. We love the impact this departure from the familiar has had on our daughter. Thus, when it came time to make decisions about her education, we felt comfortable with her choosing a different path than ours. I had followed the standard education pathway, from high school to undergraduate university studies and then on to graduate studies, culminating in a master’s degree. But, when our daughter finished middle school, instead of continuing with traditional high school classes, she enrolled in a three-year apprenticeship in conjunction with academic courses. While my daughter’s experiences are uncharted territory for us, we have always felt a sense of comfort provided by the notion that our decision-making was supported by a foundation of research, contemplation, and foresight. That is until 2020! For all our planning and considerations, what I couldn’t have predicted was how COVID-19, a virus I could previously only imagine in my nightmares, would change our world. To varying degrees, some more traumatic than others but challenging nonetheless, we have all been impacted by the virus. In regards to our daughter, we couldn’t have anticipated that the end of my daughter’s middle school career would be spent on a computer and that all schoolwide celebratory events would be cancelled. I had no idea that she would have to wear a mask in public for fear of catching a virus that was infecting and killing millions of people around the world. There was no way to predict and prepare for a global pandemic or the emotional strain and trauma that it would bring into our lives. Bottom line, when it came to COVID, we definitely didn’t have a strategic family plan! Yet here we are more than a year into a global pandemic, and it begs the question: How do we help our children process and manage this experience without being overwhelmed by fear, trauma, uncertainty, sadness, loneliness, anger…(the list goes on)?
As we continue to support and educate our children during this global pandemic, and embark on the end of the academic year transitions, we need to take a multifaceted approach. It is essential that parents and educators focus on understanding the macro and micro implications that Covid19 factors have had on our children’s experiences, emotional well-being, and education. From this foundation of understanding, we can then provide support and educational systems that are comprehensive in nature and consider both the structure and flexibility needed during these difficult times. This article will focus on resilience in children, helping children deal with scary experiences, providing support for children with special education needs during Covid, and providing smooth school transitions for all children considering Covid implications.
Are our Children Resilient? I have often heard people say, in relation to COVID-19 and other challenging situations, “Don’t worry! Kids are resilient.” Resilience is defined as the process of handling stress and recovering from trauma or adversity. So before we take a sigh of relief and agree that our children ARE O.K, or that they WILL be O.K., let's ask ourselves, “Is the notion that kids are naturally resilient really true?”
April 2021
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