ABSTRACT
The isolation related to the COVID-19 pandemic is causing both physical and mental health concerns for children worldwide. When the pandemic is over, schools and kindergartens represent a crucial context that can play an important role in promoting young people’s well-being. This paper presents a school re-entry program aimed at creating an arena where children can process emotions, rediscover interpersonal connections, and develop an awareness of effective coping strategies. For all kindergarten, primary and middle school students, suggestions for evaluating the effectiveness of the program based on its educational and psycho-social components are given. School is an ideal setting to deliver these activities to children as it represents return to their daily routine. Schools also provide equal access to resources and reach children belonging to at-risk socio-economic categories and cultural minorities. Two printable activity packs are provided as additional materials for teachers who want to recreate or adapt the presented activities for their own contexts.
Capurso, M., Dennis, J. L., Salmi, L. P., Parrino, C., & Mazzeschi, C. (2020). Empowering Children Through School Re-Entry Activities After the COVID-19 Pandemic. Continuity in Education, 1(1), 64–82. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/cie.17
( https://continuityineducation.org/articles/10.5334/cie.17/ )
Stress, Trauma, and Coping in Children Quarantine as a Stressor for Children
Because the pandemic is still evolving, there are no definitive results yet, but early evidence indicates that the quarantine related to the COVID-19 pandemic has a negative effect on children’s lives. During recent parent-based interview research in Italy and Spain, for example, Orgilés, Morales, Delvecchio, Mazzeschi, and Espada (2020) collected 1,143 parent surveys. Results showed that 86% of the respondents reported changes in their children’s behavior and expression of emotions during the quarantine, including difficulty concentrating, boredom, irritability, restlessness, loneliness, discomfort, and expression of worries. Similar results have been found in other regions of Italy (Pisano, Galimi, & Cerniglia, 2020) and China (Jiao et al., 2020). It appears, therefore, that the prolonged isolation connected to the pandemic is causing high stress and psychological consequences in children.
Stress and Its Characteristics in Children
According to one of the earliest researchers in the field, stress is defined as the “non-specific response of the body to any demand for change” (Selye, 1976, p. 137). Adaptation to stress and adversity is key to human development (Compas, Connor-Smith, Saltzman, Thomsen, & Wadsworth, 2001) and an essential function of the human body (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). That is, when facing a stressor, human beings appraise the relationship between themselves and the environment as either taxing or exceeding their resources and, therefore, endangering their wellbeing (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). As a consequence, stress is connected to the subjective assessment of one’s ability to respond to stimuli that derive from changes in the environment, the so-called “stressors” (Ammaniti, 2010). The ability to appraise and respond to stressful situations is moderated by one’s level of cognitive and emotional development (Smith & Carlson, 1997). For children and young adults, the ways by which they understand and react to stressful events depend on their level of exposure, age, gender, psychological functioning, personality, support culture, and environment, including the influence of proximal adults (Compas, 1987). Younger children are accustomed to relying on adults and other influential figures to take care of their primary needs (Shaffer & Kipp, 2013). The same is partially true also for emotional processing: Children process reality by relying on the emotions transmitted by the adults who take care of them (Bowlby, 1969), a process called emotional contagion (Coyne et al., 2020; Hatfield et al., 1994). To understand the reactions of children and adolescents in the face of critical events, it is important to embrace a developmental and dynamic perspective that sees the child as an active, persistently changing subject in a continuous relationship with his or her environment (Battacchi & Bastianoni, 2002; Lerner, Walsh, & Howard, 1998; Lingiardi & McWilliams, 2017). Research on children and adolescents shows that they are more likely than adults to report stressful changes or incidents that affect their family routines or concern their school life (Compas, 1987). For this reason, even for children, the critical factor in defining stress should be how the individual evaluates the event or situation in terms of its implications for his or her wellbeing. The majority of children tend to present only mild and transitory psychological effects even in response to intense and distressing experiences, and recovery is the norm. However, in some cases, prolonged or unmanaged exposure to stress can lead to psychopathological consequences (e.g., depression, conduct disorders, anxiety disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder; Danese, Smith, Chitsabesan, & Dubicka, 2020). Therefore, if teachers perceive persistent negative changes in a child’s behavior or emotional expressions, they should discuss them with the family (and with a school psychologist, where available) and together evaluate whether to seek professional psychological help. A clinical intervention can usually diminish the traumatic impact, assist in recovery, and bring the child back to a level of healthy academic, social, and emotional functioning (Theodore, 2016).
Coping and Resilience in Children
The strategies we employ to manage and adapt to stressful and ever-changing environments and situations are called coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). The perception of stressors and coping responses change throughout our lives and are connected to our appraisal of the situation, the type of problem faced, sociocultural aspects, and developmental stage (Losoya, Eisenberg, & Fabes, 1998; Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007). That is, coping is an active process in which a set of actions, implemented through cognitive, emotional, and behavioral strategies, are put in place to adapt to, change, or manage internal or external stressors (Compas, Jaser, Dunn, & Rodriguez, 2012). In turn, coping may be seen as connected to resilience; that is, an individual’s capacity to rediscover a state of stability during or following exposure to adverse experiences that have the potential to disrupt or destroy his or her successful functioning or development (Masten, Herbers, Cutuli, & Lafavor, 2008). Both coping and resilience serve human development because they help the individual to face difficulties (Leipold & Greve, 2009), and can be fostered in childhood if parents and educators promote trust, autonomy, personal identity, and agency (Grotberg, 2003; Spratling, Cavanaugh, Anne Derouin, Mary Dirks, & Searcy, 2019). The concepts of coping and resilience are of particular relevance for teachers and other educators because, by shifting the focus of attention away from the stressor to individual responses, they open up several areas for an educational intervention. Thus, research has shown that school-based group intervention, including trauma-processing activities, cooperative play, and creative-expressive elements delivered by trained educators, can be effective in reducing the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder and other critical outcomes in children (Tol et al., 2008).
Making Sense of Reality at School
When formal education restarts after the Covid-19 crisis, many educators will feel the urgent need and desire to “pick up where we left off.” Thus, teachers may be tempted to succumb to an urgency to recover the school program and in the process throw the pupils and themselves into a whirlwind of lectures, explanations, tests and grading, to make up for lost time as fast as possible. While such an attitude is a reasonable response to the prolonged stress and anxiety with which we all lived during the isolation, following it slavishly may cause schools to neglect basic student and teacher needs. Instead, a decisive role for the restart phase with children and young people will be to help them to build a sense of what has happened and to reconstruct their social and developmental network within the school system (Sandoval, 2013; Theodore, 2016). That is, the crucial educational task of a school resuming its activity after the COVID-19 pandemic is not to merely fulfil the curriculum, but rather to lay the cognitive and social bases of a future that can be rebuilt on (Perticari, 2012). Meeting the curriculum requirements and constructing the future are not incompatible, but only the latter can give meaning to the former. Before engaging in curriculum-based activities, therefore, schools need to instigate a sense-making process in children by providing an arena where they can process critical events connected to the Covid-19 pandemic at both an emotional and a cognitive level, thereby building up their resilience and minimize the risk of long-lasting trauma.
The Intervention
Principles and Methodology for Crisis Management in Schools
The activities presented here are based on a set of established and shared crisis-related intervention principles for educational settings (Jimerson et al., 2005; Johnson & Figley, 1998; Koplewicz & Cloitre, 2006; Theodore, 2016) implemented in different crises all over the world, and have been adapted to fit the current COVID19 crisis. We hypothesized that the guidelines detailed below would generalize well to the current context.
- Facilitate classroom discussions about the event
- All the proposed activities encourage discussions about the event, either in small groups or with the whole classroom. They all are presented in the form of open-ended prompts, allowing a great deal of free interpretation and personalization for the student, for instance, by encouraging different narrative modes (e.g., story-telling, drawing, writing, fantasy). The activities should always be presented as optional, letting the students freely choose whether to speak about what happened or not. Giving space in the classroom to children’s narratives allows teachers to provide appropriate support and to facilitate re-adjustment of individuals and groups. It also helps to mitigate children’s short- and long-term reactions to prolonged stress and to identify potentially at-risk students for further psychological evaluations by mental health professionals. Neglecting a crisis experience can have a substantial negative impact on children.
- For example, the now infamous Chowchilla kidnapping in California in 1976 involved the abduction of a busload of children, who were imprisoned in a buried container in the desert. Three days later the children escaped. Upon their return, the children were told to go home and forget about the incident. Five years later every child suffered from either depression, anxiety, or phobias, and longitudinally some continued to experience problems well into adulthood (Pitcher & Poland, 1992).
- All the proposed activities encourage discussions about the event, either in small groups or with the whole classroom. They all are presented in the form of open-ended prompts, allowing a great deal of free interpretation and personalization for the student, for instance, by encouraging different narrative modes (e.g., story-telling, drawing, writing, fantasy). The activities should always be presented as optional, letting the students freely choose whether to speak about what happened or not. Giving space in the classroom to children’s narratives allows teachers to provide appropriate support and to facilitate re-adjustment of individuals and groups. It also helps to mitigate children’s short- and long-term reactions to prolonged stress and to identify potentially at-risk students for further psychological evaluations by mental health professionals. Neglecting a crisis experience can have a substantial negative impact on children.
- Be open to feelings and uncertainty.
- The aim of the classroom discussions is not to transmit a specific content or message, but to empathically listen without judgment or suggestion and to allow children to express different feelings and thoughts and accept them as a normal part of their individuality. Children often feel more comfortable drawing or playing as a means of expressing and dealing with their feelings (Gil, 1991; Webb, 2012). The key message here is that everyone has different ways of dealing with events and stressors, it is OK to be diverse, and if we listen to others, we can learn many things. Accept children’s confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity, as those are all an index of things that they are still processing and need time to fully organize or resolve. In school settings children depend on teachers and staff for emotional support, which lends credibility to school-based crisis intervention efforts (Brock & Jimerson, 2004) and best practices indicate that children need to be linked with peers and teachers through structured activities, where energy is challenged into productive sensemaking activities that strengthen social connections (Prinstein et al., 1996).
- Provide opportunities for children to reconnect socially and with the environment.
- The goal of this kind of activity is for participants to rediscover a sense of stability; to re-establish the school routine as soon as possible and to facilitate a re-connection with each other and with their environment (see, for example, Activities 2 and 6 in Table 2 and Activity 6 in Table 3). This, in turn, promotes social competence and a positive concept of self and others, while reinforcing resilience and coping capabilities (Interdisciplinary Group on Preventing School and Community Violence, 2013).
- Shift attention from the stressful memory to an awareness of coping
- Although schools have little power over the external crisis-related events, they have ample opportunities to work on the best ways for students to respond to the difficulties posed by COVID-19-related events. Therefore, working on the coping component is a crucial activity that can and should be carried out at school. For this reason, activities that encourage students to share their coping strategies are provided both for preschoolers and older children. The suggested activities will enhance the personal growth of both students and staff through an awareness of adaptive coping strategies for dealing with the troubling situation (Saylor, Belter, & Stokes, 1997).
- Present facts and provide information
- After providing due time for the expression of concerns and feelings, school professionals should provide children with the facts and basic information about the COVID-19 pandemic and management. Always make sure to use the latest official evidence-based sources when presenting facts to prevent the spread of false information. The level and specificity of information shared should be consistent with the child’s age and level of maturity. A helpful way is to use children’s questions and products (narratives, drawings, etc.) to get an idea of their information needs. In these discussions, children can be guided to evaluate what is accurate and what is not as a means of realistically appeasing their fears and concerns. Educators should not mislead children by providing them with a false sense of safety (Sandoval, 2013; Theodore, 2016). For instance, if the school re-entry is connected to the current data about the spread of the pandemic, teachers are not to say, “we will stay together forever and never have to stay at home again.” Instead, they could say, for instance, “we are now back at school, and all adults are working to make this last, but if the coronavirus should return, we will have to take new measures.”
Following these principles, the proposed intervention is comprised of two parts: teacher training and two classroom activity-packs comprising a set of worksheets. As of May 2020, both of them are being distributed free of charge nationwide in Italy.
Makaleskop 