12 Tips for Sending Kids Back to School amid COVID
The Back to School season is always a stressful time for families. But given the seismic shift that families have undergone over the last 18 months due to the COVID pandemic, going back to school has taken on new meaning for kids and families. Parents are worried about how to best prepare kids, but also how to best prepare themselves and manage their own anxiety. If that feels familiar, you’re not alone.
If you’re wondering how to best support their children in making the transition back to school, this post is for you.
In this blog, you’ll learn 12 tips for sending kids back to school in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s structured like a Q&A, providing answers to common questions parents and caregivers may have about sending their children back to school this year.
This entire article is based on a recent webinar conversation between three child mental health experts. They are:
Dr. Helen Egger, Co-Founder and Chief Medical and Scientific Officer at Little Otter
Dr. Egger was previously the head of child psychology, child psychiatry at NYU Langone and Duke University. After 30+ years in academic medicine, she co-founded Little Otter with her daughter, Rebecca Egger, to transform how children and families access high quality mental health care. The foundation of Little Otter is Dr. Egger’s clinical scientific and operational expertise in evidence-based, high-quality pediatric mental health.
Jasmine Daniel, Director of Parent Support and Clinical Training at Little Otter
Jasmine is a licensed marriage and family therapist and board certified behavior analyst. She’s the Director of Parent Support and Clinical Training at Little Otter.
She is an integral part of connecting families to the mental health support they need.
Claire Lerner, Advisor to Little Otter
Claire is a licensed clinical social worker with more than 35 years in the field. Today, Claire is an author, consultant, and trainer. She’s also the owner of Lerner Child Development, where she works with families with children under 6 years old. For 20+ years, she led Parenting Education at ZERO TO THREE. She’s also an advisor to Little Otter. Her most recent book, “Why is My Child in Charge?” is now available from booksellers nationwide.
This back to school season brings with it new challenges, and new concerns. Here are 12 common concerns, and our insights.
1. How has the pandemic impacted children’s mental health?
The starting point for this difficult transition is that there are a lot of children who have already been struggling with some kind of mental health challenge. We’re not only thinking about new issues that come up, but also that many children are already vulnerable and already are experiencing mental health challenges.
We had a child mental health crisis even before this pandemic started.
Twenty percent of children - one out of five children, including kids two to six years old - have an impairing mental health disorder. Eighty percent of these kids do not get any mental health care.
And sadly, even kids who do get mental health care often are not getting high-quality, evidence-based care.
The other sobering fact is that suicide is the second leading cause of death for 15 to 18 years old. It’s also the second leading cause of death for children 10 to 14 years old.
During the pandemic, we've seen emergency room mental health visits for children, both teens and younger children, increase by 30%.
So when we're thinking about the additional stress of this pandemic on families and children, and the uncertainty of this upcoming school year, we have to realize that this stress is in addition to a problem that wasn't being met before.
That’s why we built the Back to School Mental Health Toolkit for families with kids 2-12 years old. We wanted to help families ask the important questions, so that they can know if and when to worry.
Get Little Otter’s Free Back to School Toolkit
The Back to School Mental Health Toolkit starts with a free five-minute quiz where you answer questions. Then you’ll immediately get a personalized assessment back in four areas: child social and emotional challenges, parent mental health, parent stress, and school feelings and challenges. Depending on where things are for your child and family, you’ll get actionable advice and activities that you can do with your child.
2. When should we worry about a child's emotions and behaviors?
The first thing to remember is that mental health challenges are disregulation or disruptions of emotions, behavior, and sometimes thinking.
Throughout childhood, children are learning to manage emotions and behaviors when they have big feelings like sadness, fear, and frustration. That’s the key skill they’re learning to develop.
It’s important to pay attention when we see a child struggling to learn the skills they need to regulate emotions and behaviors. It’s also important to pay attention when a child who was previously doing well at emotional and behavioral regulation begins to have trouble.
If you see changes in your child’s emotions, behavior, eating, appetite, sleep, tummy aches and headaches or other aches and pains, that can be a sign that something is going on.
Also, look into their conversation and in their play. If you see themes of sadness, worry, death, or danger, pay attention.
3. Do you have concrete tips for preparing your child to go back to school?
Actively talk with your child about what it will be like to go back to school. Talk about the unknowns. Make sure to discuss their daily school day schedule, their teacher(s), who's the safe person to talk to, and how to stay safe at school during the pandemic. Ask them what situations they’re concerned about, what’s scary about it, and talk about how to handle it.
For example, what happens if they have to go to the bathroom badly and they don't know how to get there? Who will they talk to if a kid says something not nice to them? Help prepare them by walking through those scenarios.
Sometimes parents forget to explain basic things, like what happens at drop-off and pickup. If you haven’t talked about it before waving goodbye, your kid might be thinking, “Wait, hold on. Do I live here now? What's going on?”
Give your child space to talk openly about their feelings.
This is an uncertain time, and lots of kids (and parents) are nervous about the return to school. You can help your child just by validating their emotions and talking with them. Let them know that all feelings are okay.
4. How can we help kids navigate this transition back to school and deal with separation?
Let's humanize children's emotions and recognize that as adults, it's already been hard to transition back to school, back to school, back to work and back to our lives. Kids are having the same major feelings that we do.
It's okay for kids to want to be with their parents. And after having been together all this time, why would they want to be somewhere different? We’ve been through a major change, and now your children are fine being at home with you. It’s okay that they might struggle with the transition.
It may be helpful to do play dates with kids in their class, so they know some kids that are going to be at school. That way, it doesn't feel as scary to be in a room with people that they don't know.
Another critical thing is to have routines and rituals around transition times. We know a family that does affirmations together on the way to school. That's their ritual for going to school. Then, they get out of the car, and they have a little handshake that they do.
Do whatever feels good for your kids, so they can feel connected to you throughout the day, but also know what to expect on their way to school. All of these things are important for helping them feel confident around the separation.
5. What if my child doesn’t want to go to school?
Here are a few things to know when your child starts hedging about going back to school:
First, often it's the transition that they're having trouble with - it's not actually being at school. Don't necessarily take what they say at face value. You have to understand what they’re trying to tell you.
Second, try not to communicate in some way, shape, or form, that you’re trying to convince them school is a good idea.
This is an incredibly common pitfall for parents that can open up the idea that school is a choice. Kids may then fall into that black hole and it confuses things. It's so much more helpful for parents to say “This is your job. I'm doing my job, and I'm here to help you navigate yours, which is school.”
6. Should we be concerned that our children have fallen behind during the pandemic?
There are some developmental concerns, and many families worry that their children have fallen behind. But finding reliable information is a challenge; the media is full of mixed messages. One day you see an article saying kids are resilient, they're gonna be fine, they’ll catch up. And the next, it's about how kids are falling behind and they’re not prepared. It's the Wild West out there for parents.
So, will the kids be okay? The truth is, we don't know the answer to this question yet.
We don’t know whether children have been impacted in their cognitive, academic, social or emotional development.
We do know that children are very resilient. For the most part, they’re able to bounce back to where they would be, even if there’s been a dip. But let’s clarify that word “resilient.” Sometimes when we hear resilient, we think then we don't have to do anything, that kids will be okay. That's not what “resilient” means.
“Resilient” means they're capable of bouncing back. It doesn't mean that if we don’t worry about them or talk about all the changes, that they'll be fine.
It goes further: when children have challenges, they're not failing to be resilient. Lack of resiliency happens when children have faced challenges, stressors, traumas, adversity to the degree that they are not able to function in the way that you would hope that they would.
Helen’s research clearly shows that each additional stressor a child experiences doubles the chance that the child is going to have an impairing mental health disorder. This is true until you reach five or more stressors; at that point, 100% of those children have an impairing mental health disorder. That is not because those children failed to be resilient. It's because they were in an environment, in a context, that no human being could emerge from without some impact.
If your child's behavior is changing at all, consider what's going on for them. If changes are happening, that doesn't necessarily mean that they won't get back to where they were. It may turn out that they may have a “new normal” - and that’s 100% fine, too.
COVID created a new normal for all of us, for adults and children. What we've known to be normal before is likely not what's going to be normal in the future. It’s important to acknowledge that there may be some differences, while being supportive around those changes.
“Resilience” depends on validation, on giving kids space to talk about how they're feeling. When we don't allow that, these changes can become problematic because your children won’t know who to turn to, or where to go with their big feelings and challenges they’re experiencing. If you don’t create space for these conversations, they might learn that they’re supposed to “move on” and not talk about these things, which can cause them to fester.
7. How should parents respond to negative self-talk?
If your child says things like, “I'm a bad person,” “I'm stupid,” “I'm ugly,” “I hate myself,” don’t jump in to say something like “Oh, no honey, you’re beautiful. You shouldn’t be worried about that.” In those moments, it’s important to listen to your child, to be non-judgmental, to be open.
You want your child to know that we all have big feelings and all feelings are okay - we can handle it. We're not scared by feelings.
It’s common for parents to react quickly when their child says something that sounds negative, or expresses that they aren’t confident about going back to school. When that happens, we might tell them how much they’re going to love it, how smart they are, and how amazing their teacher is. We shift into action because their uncomfortable feelings are making us uncomfortable, and our knee-jerk reaction is to make it all go away.
The trouble is, this reaction rarely makes feelings go away. In fact, as we now know, this reaction can cause feelings to fester because the child doesn't have a chance to put these feelings on the table and get the ultimate reassurance they need. This reassurance can only happen once their feelings have been acknowledged and validated.
As parents, we're there to take their feelings seriously, and help them if they're suffering.
Only once we’ve done that can we begin to ask questions about whether this is a transient thing, or something that's more serious.
This message is “Don't fear the feelings, feelings are not right or wrong.” Embracing this as a family is so important. It’s one one of the greatest gifts parents give to kids.
8. When should parents and caregivers seek additional support for perceived mental health concerns in children?
Are your kid’s challenges are impacting their development in some way? Is their functioning interfering with their ability to successfully have friends, go to school, or go to friends’ houses? Is it disrupting home life in any way?
If you're seeing those signs in your child, or you're seeing this impact on the child or your family, that’s a good time to go through the toolkit to understand how your kids and family are doing.
That may also be the time to seek an assessment with a trained pediatric mental health specialist to find out what's going on, and see what can be done to help.
That's the other super important thing: we can help.
Yes, these are common challenges, and we have awesome ways to support children and families. Evidence-based treatment can make a world of difference.
In addition, children are not a monolithic group. When we think about this back to school transition, it’s critical to know the starting point for the child and family. Every child’s experience has been different. For some kids, this is a big separation. Others may have been back to school for a while, and still others may never have seen a group setting.
That understanding will help us understand why a child may have different concerns than their peers, such as a bigger challenge with separation, or why they might be more overwhelmed in the group situation and turn inward, or alternatively, why they might become aggressive, or why a child might resist going to school.
That's an important foundation to help us move forward in thinking specifically about this transition.
9. What children are the most impacted by the pandemic?
The kids who are going to be most impacted are the kids who were already disadvantaged in some way.
Kids who are in under-resourced communities and in schools that didn't provide the support and resources for them to flourish are going to be even more impacted.
Children who have learning differences like Dyslexia are also likely to be impacted because they haven't gotten the intensive special services that they would have received before.
This is even true of kids who don't necessarily have a developmental challenge, but who were “Zoom school”-aversive. These are the kids who were doing cartwheels around the table because they were so uncomfortable with this 2D medium. Those kids may have fallen behind because they weren’t able to engage appropriately with the information, which is not their fault.
Kids get a lot of services in school; children have individualized education plans. Children who experience developmental challenges like Autism spectrum disorder have access to intensive services in school. At home, and a lot of those services have been disrupted.
If your child already has been identified as having challenges in this area, be aware of how things are going and continue to be the fierce advocate as a parent to make sure your kid gets the assessment(s) that they have a right to under education laws. Make sure that they’re getting the services they can.
This can be exhausting, but it’s important for parents to advocate. Make sure that the people who can help your child and your family are aware, so you can get access to the services your child needs.
It emphasizes the importance of understanding the child's narrative, understanding where they're coming from. Then, you can work collaboratively with the teachers and the staff to help them understand the child’s context and access the resources that your child needs.
10. How can we help children who have had very limited social experiences with peers recently transition into a class setting?
As humans, we’re all social beings. But even as adults, we forget how difficult it can be to navigate social situations. We’re having to get used to being in public again after life on Zoom. We forgot how people act, what they smell like, what being in public can sound like. Our kids are, too.
Supporting them in navigating new situations is the biggest piece of building social skills.
Here’s a blog that provides more detail about 5 tips to help your children develop social skills for school.
Finally, give your kids grace when they aren't interacting in ways that feel socially acceptable, and if they aren’t where you think they should be age-wise.
11. What are some tips for interacting with kids after school?
As a parent, it can be worrying to ask your child “What did you do at school today"?” only to hear “nothing” or “I was bored” or “no one played with me.”
Every child has their own identity and temperament, which can show up in their interactions after the school day. (In this blog, we provide more detail about what these responses mean and how to have better after-school conversations.
Some children can feel bombarded by questions after a long day at school, and may react by withdrawing or pushing you away. It's okay for them to have some space (especially as they get older). Other children, particularly those who need some time with transitions, need to be able to reconnect with you in simpler ways that don't involve questions or reviewing the day. As a parent, it’s helpful to express interest, but don’t demand that you know all the things that are going on.
Even when you hear things that are worrying, remember that they may not always be accurate. Often times these phrases are a proxy or code for other worries, experiences, and challenges.
This is why it’s important to develop a relationship with your child's teachers. That will allow you to check in about concerns and balance what you're hearing from your child with what the teacher is saying.
Discover what each of these answers might signal and how to encourage better after-school conversations in this recent blog.
12. How can we support families and parents in dealing with their own stress, grief, and experiences around children going back to school?
Parent mental health is essential for child mental health.
We know that one of the best ways to support a child's mental health is to make sure that the child's caregiver’s mental health is strong.
If you're facing challenges of anxiety or depression, or having conflict in your relationship with your partner, getting help helps more than yourself. You're actually going to be helping your child. Your mental health is one of the biggest gifts you can give your children.
As a parent, it’s helpful to model the self-care behaviors we want our children to have.
Parents often ask, “If I'm upset with my kid and I walk away and I need to take a break, is that okay?” The answer is “Absolutely.” That helps your child learn that when they’re upset, they take a break and calm down, instead of saying things they don’t mean.
Likewise, when we’re at the brink of, “I can't handle anything right now. I'm so exhausted,” we’re teaching our kids that it’s okay to get to that place. When we take care of ourselves so that we don’t become overwhelmed, exhausted, and burnt out, we’re showing them how to navigate those feelings, too.
As part of our human experience, as part of our parenting experience, there will be times when we’re tired, when we don't have all the right answers, and when we don't behave the way we thought we should in the moment for our children. And that's okay. How we recover from that - and show our children how they can recover - is important.
Adoring and loving your child and needing breaks are not mutually exclusive. That is the human parenting experience.
At a family level, this continues to be a time of incredible stress and uncertainty.
Anxiety and uncertainty erode our feeling of safety - this is the unique challenge of the moment. How do we process and manage our feelings and experiences? How do we take care of each other? How can we create meaning out of experiences that we don't control?
During this uncertain time, it’s important for families to be connected, have clarity about our values, and know how to support each other. Giving to others outside of your family is one of the best ways to overcome that feeling of powerlessness in challenging times.
When helping children manage the start of a new, challenging school year, and helping them navigate mental health and social issues, the family and the caregivers are as important as the child.
This circles back to the Back to School Mental Health Toolkit, which looks at four key areas:
Child Emotional & Social Challenges
School Feelings
Family & Caregiver Mental Health
Family Stress
There is help. Little Otter is expanding every month to be able to provide this kind of immediate care to parents and children.
When you’re ready, you can start your Back to School Mental Health Toolkit here.
Have additional questions? Want more resources? Want to learn more? Just email Little Otter and someone will get back to you to respond.
From all of us at Little Otter, we wish you a healthy transition back to work and school.
