We Need to Model Post-Pandemic Resilience for Our Children
It’s fair to assume that most parents at some point during the past year felt desperate about what our kids were missing out on. Young children lacked basic socialization or “real” school experience. Teenagers who were already desperate to figure out their place in the world (and by “world” I mean the social hierarchy of their school) may have found these months especially lonely and isolated. The teenagers have given up on all sorts of traditional holiday milestones.
All this is true and true. They missed a lot . It’s been a shitty year in all kinds of ways, and we may be worried about how they’ll regulate how things keep opening up for months to come. Will they feel the long-term negative effects of isolation? Answer: well, maybe for some kids it depends.
However, parents cannot reverse the pandemic. As much as we grieve for all that was lost, this loss got out of our control. However, what ‘s under our control is how we get out of it. As Judith Warner writes for the New York Times :
Ms [Phyllis] Fagell, [therapist, school counselor, and author of 2019 High School Questions ], along with over a dozen other adolescent development experts interviewed for this article, were adamant that parents should not one should panic – and that, in addition, it is necessary to stop spreading the story of the “lost year”. To get a complete picture of what is happening to high school students, and to be ready to help them, they agreed, it is necessary to keep in mind two seemingly conflicting ideas at the same time: Last year was terrible. And most high school students will be fine.
It is often said that children are resilient, and to some extent this is true. Children are not immune to trauma, quite the opposite, but they can be adapted, especially when they are in a loving, supportive environment. We cannot fill the void of everything they have lost in the past year; all these face-to-face meetings with friends, extracurricular activities and sleepovers they might have are gone. But what we can do is model how to get out of this time by showing them how to tighten this muscle of stability, as we do.
Back in April last year, when it was not even four weeks before that, when we were still working with a two-week step and could not fully understand how bad things were already and how much worse they would be, I wrote about soft skills. during this time our children were developing . Here’s what I said then:
Right now, our children are taking a crash course in patience, resilience, communication, conflict resolution, compromise, creative thinking, empathy, and mindfulness. These are soft skills that we practice with them every day to a certain extent, but things have escalated now. They need to learn to be patient with parents who can’t get off the conference call to serve them snacks (or they need to figure out how to get a snack for themselves). They resolve conflict with their siblings every four minutes. They try to find ways to cheer a friend on their birthday in the quietest way possible.
We don’t need to tell Pollyanna what was the brightest of hellish years, but if we haven’t already, we need to start focusing on all the ways our kids grew up, adapted, how they coped. punch – even when it was hard, and even when rolling was less than graceful.
It was not a “wasted year.” Yes, it was a year of loss, but if we squint hard enough, we can see the good that he brought us and our children: a renewed love of nature, appreciation for the opportunity to spend time with a large family, and even our views on technology and screen time have changed. as it has become the primary way to maintain important relationships. They may have learned less than usual in math class, but they learned an incredible amount about what it means to sacrifice to protect others.
Our kids will almost always figure out how to handle something from us, and this is one of the biggest and most difficult things they have yet to handle. There were many dark days, many disruptions associated with the impossibility of what was expected of us all – to live, work and study with each other, practically on top of each other. But we did it, we made it work, we tried to give each other grace, and maybe we even got into some kind of rut.
Remind them – and yourself – that surviving this pandemic and coming out on the other side, no matter how bruised and bruised we feel, is proof that we can do hard things. And this is worth recognizing and even celebrating. So when you talk about what returning to face-to-face education looks like, or the little steps you take to reunite with society over the summer, be sure to point out not only what has been lost in the past few months, but also what was received.