Kids need a gap year during a pandemic
I went to see my dentist recently, the mom of a 7 year old. Like many Marin kids, her son’s been attending school virtually the past year.
It hasn’t been going well. After a few hours, he loses interest and zones out, she said with a sigh.
It’s understandable. I remember when my kids were that age, which feels like an eternity ago. Sitting for hours on end behind a desk in a classroom wasn’t easy for two energetic boys. I can’t even imagine what it would like to have them sit before a computer, Zooming with their teacher and classmates all day.
When the realities of the pandemic began to settle in last March, when I stopped going to the IJ office and fired up my laptop from my dining room table, when I began reading about mothers who were losing it as they tried to work from home (if they were lucky to be able to do that, that is) while also helping their children with schooling and homework, I felt so grateful that my kids are now young adults, out of the house, working and healthy. Because if they were still in school, I’d be losing it, too.
If ever there was a time to tweak our expectations of what we expect from our children, it’s now.
Still, I can’t help but think we’ve gone about it all wrong.
A survey of more than 20,000 students across the country taken last spring found that just 39% thought they were actually learning anything from virtual schooling. Worse, half said they were feeling depressed, stressed or anxious — aren’t we all to various degrees? — especially Black and Latino and Latina students.
Maybe things are better now, a year later, but my gut — a bit squishier than usual, thanks to the pandemic — says it’s not.
Youths in Marin, where two tweens have recently taken their lives, and across the country are experiencing a mental health crisis with few resources available to help them. This is over and beyond the 6% of youths who were already living with serious emotional or behavioral challenges before the pandemic.
Instead of forcing kids to carry on with the usual academic subjects, what they needed was a gap year. A year when we could have helped them deal with their feelings of isolation, anxiety and grief, and given them tools so they can learn to be resilient, compassionate, kind and appreciative, and how to practice self-care.
Scientists say the coronavirus is likely to linger for years to come, and will probably not be the only pandemic in our kids’
| lives. Even if it is, they are certain to face an uncertain future as the effects of climate change become even more apparent than they have been in recent years.
Hurricanes, flooding, excessive heat, wildfires, drought — this is their future.
No one wants children to fall behind academically, and nine in 10 parents say they are very worried about that. But eight in 10 parents also say their children are stressed.
That worries me a heck of a lot more than the academics. You can catch up on academics, but mental health issues need to be addressed quickly so they don’t fester, because they do. Research shows that people who experience adverse experiences in childhood are impacted in myriad ways throughout their life.
Across the country, more kids than ever before are earning Fs for their schoolwork. If we have to keep grading — and I question why we need to — shouldn’t everyone get an A just for surviving through this thing? If ever there was a time to tweak our expectations of what we expect from our children, it’s now.
There should be an asterisk for the school year — these grades don’t matter, no one will hold them against you, you get a buy! Better yet, ditch the grades; reach out to the kids who seem to be struggling with their schoolwork and ask them, “How are you doing? Is something going on? Is there something you want to share? I’m listening.”
In her latest book, “Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World,” Larkspur therapist Madeline Levine continues the message from her previous books and therapy practice. We need to teach our kids the skills to face what she calls a “volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous” world.
Anxiety is the No. 1 mental health disorder for both kids and adults, she notes. And that was before the pandemic.
“What we really want to cultivate is well-being, which includes a generous portion of optimism as our child’s nature allows and the coping skills, and therefore the resilience, that make adaptive recovery from challenge possible,” she writes.
If my kids were still in school, their mental health would come first, full stop. Then I’d look for examples of how people faced tragedy — Holocaust survivors who kept hopeful despite the horrors around them; Marin poet Javier Zamora, who got through the trauma of crossing the Guatemala-Mexico border alone when he was just 9 years old; Marin’s Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the Little Rock Nine, who braved violent resistance to integration of her high school in 1957; Marin’s
Dr. Bruce (B.J.) Miller, who was inspired to become a palliative doctor after nearly dying in an accident at age 19 that left him a triple amputee. Like Fred Rogers’ mom told him when he was scared, we’d look for the helpers and think about how all of us can be helpers. We’re going to need each other for the tough decades ahead; we need each other now, to work toward social and racial justice. And, of course, there would be a lot of holding each other close.
Marin schools are set to receive a few million dollars to reopen, part of which will go toward “mental health wellness.” I’m no expert, I’m just a mom, but it seems to me that should have been the priority from Day One.