Students Endemic The post COVID effect
There is a lot our school students have gone through last year, the effects of which are life long and very intense.
The cancellation of classes, online schooling, and lack of human interaction, long sittings on screens, academic backlog, and uncertainty about examinations has an adverse psychological impact on children. All these factors and many more such as staying indoors all day long have increased the sense of isolation among children, which is leading to anxiety, depression and disappointment. Increased exposure to screen time, exposure to online abuse, bullying, has severely affected the mental health of adolescents.
We as adults need to be compassionate towards the needs of our children and provide them with support to adjust back to normal life with schools re-opening, offline exams conduction and digital detoxification. There are some facts we need to accept with our children, that online teaching has not successfully taken over offline teaching in terms of concept clearing and completing syllabus. The understanding level of each child differs with their own preferred style of learning. There is still no clarity as to what the examinations and results would be like and what course the post examination scenario would be like. So this becomes the responsibility of each of us as caretakers of children to keep yourself updated with latest changes to be introduced for students and their career after school to lessen the burden from our children and understand their needs and aspirations rather than getting lost in the clouds of uncertainties. Keep yourself updated with latest webinars, career fairs and examination tips along with your children who are in senior classes. This will give a great sigh of relief to students and make them feel not alone in this important journey of their life.
Child should feel safe at school, community and wherever he/she goes. Due to the longstanding regressive attitude prevalent in the society, we consider children to be fragile, inexperienced and unworthy of forming any opinion Awareness should be created among teachers, parents, community members, volunteers about how to identify and assess the mental health of children and what will be the impact of the aforementioned stressors on it. Government, civil society, professionals and the public should come forward and provide a platform for children to express their perspectives and become active partners. The need of the hour is to identify and contribute to their wellbeing through opinion formation, expression and action. Children need to be heard while developing matters of public health, school, social services and media use. We need to strengthen children’s expression through deeper engagement.
“To be in your children’s memories tomorrow, you have to be in their lives today” – Barbra Johnson
