Another week and another article is released showing some of the many affects of COVID-19 that are causing as many disruptions indirectly as are being caused through the illness itself. As parents, or guardians, of children in America the need to be attuned to your child’s, and your own, needs has never been more urgent.
While it can be easy for some children to tune out many of the changes that have been implemented due to the disease, there are many children who may have been coping well with life pre-COVID that are finding difficulty with the upheaval to their routines that has come about.
As many people who are involved in the mental health profession can attest, the responses from children and adolescents can widely vary in any situation, for different reasons. Even in the most “normal” of times there is a cohort of children who struggle to cope with the day-to-day demands of school and even family life. Many children and adolescents are resistant to going to school for different reasons. Social anxiety, separation anxiety, bullying or other peer difficulties, feeling they are not measuring up academically, difficulty with emotion regulation at school, and others are often cited as reasons that students resist.
During the closures mandated by the virus, there are a number of these children who are feeling more at ease as Zoom or other video conferencing apps has made their lives less complicated socially and therefore easier for them to navigate and, probably more importantly, manage their emotions. As we pointed out in a previous post , there are many ways that parents can positively interact with their children during this time and find a positive out of this unprecedented negative that has affected virtually everyone.
…the proportion of mental health–related ED visits increased sharply beginning in mid-March 2020 (week 12) and continued into October (week 42) with increases of 24% among children aged 5–11 years and 31% among adolescents aged 12–17 years, compared with the same period in 2019.
CDC report released 11/13/2020
As we look at the above statistic from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), one thought that seems to come to mind quickly is: how many of those visits were “first time” and how many were children whose lives were already filled with internal and external chaos?
As parents, one of our main jobs is to help our children navigate and make sense of experiences that can be confusing and feel threatening. For some children, many of whom were already receiving mental health services prior to the pandemic, the disruption is sometimes welcome, as mentioned above. However, there are many children who may have been seemingly functioning well with stable schedules of school, sports or other activities, family trips, or visits with relatives or friends whose lives have become drastically uprooted. It is also sometimes the case that we as adults don’t feel we have adequate answers to give our children and therefore we try to avoid talking about the situation at all.
Our suggestion at psychdomain.com is to make sure you keep open dialogue with your children even, or perhaps especially, if they are quiet and have not shown any type of outward emotion during this time. It is our finding as people who have worked with children for years, that it can very often be the case that the loud, disruptive child, often called an “externalizer” is given help more quickly because their difficulties affect so many of the people around them.
However, there are often just as many “interalizers” who are not often openly expressive of emotions and often become more introverted and quiet when they become stressed. In classroom settings, these children often will not get introduced to services because their behaviors are typically socially appropriate and unless there are sudden changes to behaviors these children often are what is termed “under the radar.” These children or adolescents often will show little emotional distress that is overt until they are completely overwhelmed. It seems very possible that many of the children involved in this increase in ER trips during the pandemic came from this group as the group can be easily overlooked due to them often being seen as more responsible and regulated than their externalizing counterparts during normal times.
This is not to say that every child or adolescent needs to be preemptively taken to some type of mental health service just on the off chance that something may be wrong. Even though children are typically very resilient, there are usually holes in their thinking, even in the smartest of children.
Holding an expectation of open and honest communication in your home can have many beneficial effects for your children and for the adults in the home as well. It can force you to be better informed and, by extension, to build and use your critical thinking faculties to a larger degree. Encourage discussion in the home and allow your children to ask questions of what is being reported. They likely have many questions about what is happening and if they are not answered by a competent adult they will be answered either by the child themselves, who may or may not have the ability to answer such complex questions, or it could be answered by source that may not be as accurate as you would hope.
Helping your children feel safe and respected enough to verbalize their feelings or concerns to you can help them make sense of everything that is going on around them. In a world with so many complex social platforms and channels, they will need to have some trusted people to whom they can return for advice when they may be feeling confused and in need of a sounding board for thoughts or opinions that are growing in their minds at that time. If you as an adult in their life shut them down or minimize their thinking without helping them see the errors or other possible interpretations of their thinking, they will sometimes become reluctant to examine their thinking and become more steeped in thinking errors that can become larger problems later in life.
It is an idea we will be encouraging often on this site and we both have used with families we work with right now: use this pandemic as a means for building new skills and helping your children, and maybe yourself, to learn to make opportunities out of crises in life. This can help your children become more attuned to unpredictable situations and help them learn ways to cope with their anxiety around crises or any event that forces them to temporarily change their expected routines.