Living in Uncertain Times

How Can Parents Help Their Children With Anxiety?

In my training as a clinical psychologist, I must have missed out the ‘Dealing with a global pandemic’ module. Because when it happened, in March 2020, I was ill-equipped to deal with it. When they said we had to stand 2 metres away from each other, it was weird. When they said we couldn’t travel, it was a shock. Then they closed the schools, and we know we were in uncharted territory.

Making sense of that experience was hard. No one could say, oh yes, the last time this happened…because it hadn’t. No one could say, oh, we know how this goes…because they didn’t. We were all making it up as we went along. Living from day to day with as much hand sanitiser and toilet paper as we could find.

It was a hard time to be a parent. Schools were closed, playgrounds were locked and playdates were banned. Many parents, like myself, were working remotely full time and had to try and do so with children just the other side of the door. For a while, I worked in the bathroom. It was the only room in the house where I could reliably close the door and know that no one else would come in.

Then it was considered to be over, and everything was ‘back to normal’. Children were back at school, and the focus was on catch up. Quickly, covid practices faded into the past. One-way arrows on the floors of shops and signs which urge us to social distance are historical artefacts already.

Covid was a big psychological adjustment for adults. A lot of uncertainty, of fear and loss. But for adults, those two years were in the context of our whole life. We could remember what things were like before.

For young children, it was very different. For them, ‘normal life’ quickly faded into the past and covid times were all they could remember. They played at washing their hands as they went into shops, and wore little masks, just like the grown-ups. They learnt that you don’t hug people you don’t live with and you can’t go into their houses. They learnt that there was an invisible virus everywhere, and we had to guard against it.

They learnt that the world wasn’t a safe place and that their parents weren’t all powerful.

Then, in 2022, we expected them to get back to a normal which to them didn’t feel normal. We expected life to resume as if those two years hardly happened.

When difficult things happen to us, we have to make sense of them. We have to integrate them into our experience, into our way of understanding the world. For young children, this is particularly hard, because the world is a confusing and unpredictable place. They don’t have the language to understand what is happening. Because of this, adults often think that children aren’t affected by their experiences. They think that they are ‘oblivious’ and they don’t bring up the past, in case it upsets them.

Young children (and adults, but particularly young children) hold memories in their bodies. They don’t necessarily remember what happened, but the memory is there, held in sensations and feelings. It shows up in fear and anger, in frustration and sadness. They often don’t want to talk about it, and they won’t know why it’s there.

Parents can help them to make sense of their experiences, and that’s what I’m talking about in my next solo webinar on Sunday, June 11th. Helping Your Child with Anxiety, for the under-8s especially.