Since having first felt the effects of COVID-19 earlier this year, for most of us the past 8 months have been a whirlwind of uncertainty, adaptation, and restlessness. Parents and educators have been placed in unfathomable roles, trying to determine how to best promote our children’s education while still ensuring their safety in an unprecedented circumstance. How do you weigh a child’s safety against their developmental needs? A seemingly impossible question to answer with confidence. The stress of sending our children back to school, knowing the risk, is bound to cause anxiety and self-doubt for any parent or educator. 

As we navigate sending our kids to school each day, it is important to know that our children are highly attuned to how we are feeling and behaving, looking for cues within us that provide them with important information. Such attunement to us serves as a survival mechanism, allowing them to formulate and idea about what is safe and how to best prepare and respond in unsafe or uncertain situations. The problem with such attunement is that children can easily develop fears and anxiety as a result of being exposed to a caregiver’s fear and anxiety. And while we all want our children to be cautious and fearful of unsafe or dangerous situations, we also don’t want our children to be preoccupied or impaired by worries or anxiety. We want them to be kids, right? And leave the tough stuff to us to worry about.

So what can we do to help? First, know that it is important for your children to be aware of COVID-19 and the safety practices that are expected of them and others. But know that simply how you talk about COVID-19 in your home and with your children, how you respond to lapses in safety measures, how you say goodbye each day, and how you pick them up each day will go a long way to impact how your children feel each day as they attend school.  They pick up on the language we are using, the urgency or hypervigilance underlying our behavior, the uncertainty or fear we feel as we say goodbye, or the overwhelming relief we feel when they are back safe with us. If they sense our panic, uncertainty, or fear of separation then they are more likely to also experience these feelings themselves each day.

Instead, our children benefit when they know and feel that they can trust that the adults in their lives have their safety figured out, in a way that takes the burden of fear off of them. Simply exuding confidence as a protective shield for them, offering calm and collected reassurance in response to the unknowns, and promoting safety practices in a calm and wise manner can go a long way to help your child be aware of COVID-19 but without leaving them vulnerable to being preoccupied by anxiety or fear. For instance, many of you wouldn’t be sending your children to school if you didn’t feel you could trust the school to take the proper precautions to keep them safe – your children benefit from feeling that from you as you drop them off each day. Your calm, confident, and collected approach is what will give them the security to make the most of their day at school.

In the context of COVID-19, we have been too often faced with difficult choices and uncomfortable situations. It has undoubtably been difficult for everyone. But if we are focusing in on a shared goal of wanting what’s best for our children, know that they benefit from knowing that they don’t have to be preoccupied with worries, because the adults in their lives have that figured out for them. That way, they can simply focus on being a kid while leaving all the big stuff for us grown-ups to handle.

Erika Kohne, LMHC

Reference:  Circleofsecurityinternational.com