The Little Blue Book

In times of crisis, your children – both younger and older – need you. Regardless of their age, they will be ‘tuned-in’ to your anxieties and your responses to what’s happening around them. How you respond to them, and how you model your behaviours, can strengthen or erode their feelings of security, their resilience, anxiety response and mental health. Through the uncertainty of this pandemic, they will feel your concerns for the future. For some, if the house is constantly filled with news of hardship pouring from the TV, they may be plainly scared – worried for you, worried for grandparents, and worried for themselves. Your children will take their cues from your reactions. They too will be wondering what the future will hold for them. They too will be struggling to make sense of the pandemic and its impact, and, for families experiencing financial difficulty or loss of employment, to make sense of changes to their lives. If lockdown returns – there is no guarantee that it won’t – many will also struggle with loss of connection that comes with isolation and confinement, with loss of routine, and with the unfamiliar pressure that comes from being ‘cooped up’. They will miss their friends and the emotional support those friendships give them. Through each stage of this crisis, their emotional needs will change as different pressures and anxieties surface. You will need to respond to thoseneeds, tobealert tosignsof anxietyandtorespond inways thatwill help them. At the root of it, they need to understand from you that while things are tough “now”, it is not a “forever” change – that it will pass, things always pass, and that you have each other to help yourselves through. HELPING YOUR YOUNG PEOPLE MANAGE ANXIETY COVID-19: The Challenge 56