The Covid Months Where are the children?
Lockdown started overnight. Schools were closed and the children gone, locked in at home, like everyone else. Our therapists were distraught. No time for those all important goodbyes. No explanations. No possibility of exploring other ways of staying connected. For many children one of the few moments in the week when they were free to safely express themselves had disappeared, cut off by an out of control virus. Some children would be safe, protected by the immunity of well resourced homes and parents who had the means to manage the spiralling chaos the country had plummeted into. But other children were far from safe, their already disadvantaged lives made even more perilous and uncertain. Incarcerated for twenty four hours a day with families who had few personal or financial resources and were already struggling to cope.
But for every child one thing was the same - there was no warning, no preparation no precedent. Nothing to fall back on in that bleak ‘One simple message - STAY HOME!’
One of my colleagues, Emily, told me how she worries about what young children are learning in the so called ‘new normal’. Fear of the virus and the consequent mistrust of others, heightened by social distancing, is eroding personal relationships. Small pieces are breaking off and crumbling day after day after day. A hug from Granny, a high five from a teacher, rough and tumble with friends - familiar, reliable reassuring touch which normally lives embedded in a child’s day to day world fuelling emotional and biological well being. These losses are compounded by the erosion of almost all normal routines and structures. With all that is safe, predictable and familiar for children and young people shrunk to its bare bones we will see an exponential rise in childhood anxiety and depression and trauma unless we act to mitigate it.
During these Covid months so many children have been bereft by the disappearance of important family members, leaving them confused, lost and upset. Children with mothers who are in prison are not allowed to visit them. Contact with their mothers severed overnight. A dreadful, traumatic disruption of those all-important bonds that foster trust, security, self-confidence and resilience. Women were promised that they would be allowed out of prison, at least temporarily, to be with their children. A promise not kept for most.
Some of our most vulnerable children are locked inside homes where everyday violence, coercive control or sexual abuse is taken for granted. Terrified and locked in, they have no respite from the dangers that threatens to engulf and overwhelm them with every unpredictable moment. These fragile minds and bodies have lost any safe harbour.
At the Northern Guild pre-lockdown our team was supervising 377 hours of weekly therapy for young children and 274 hours of weekly therapy for young people, a total of 651 hours of therapy each week. Since lockdown, for young children it is now 65 hours of weekly therapy with only one of those sessions being face to face and 115 hours for young people with 6 of those sessions being face to face. A new total of 180 hours of weekly therapy. 471 hours have been lost!
We need to do something about this urgently. As our schools reopen Child Psychotherapists and Counsellors will need to work alongside teachers to open up new ways of working with children. There is no doubt that children will be helped enormously by seeing their teachers again, being with friends and having more normal routines. But they will also need the opportunity to give expression to the things they have internalised during this time so that their pain can be expunged & helped to heal.
Ingenuity, flexibility and imaginative thinking are needed. There is a huge range of possibilities to be considered but they will all require teachers and therapists working together to create strategies that fit the unique context of each school, its community and its children. For example, with older children and adolescents remote working is readily possible if they are comfortable with it and have the privacy and facilities to make it feasible. As schools open up their buildings setting aside a room for students to access remote facilities so that they can talk to their therapist can become a new resource.
Generally, younger children need face to face approaches. Smaller size classes give scope for therapists to become part of the class ‘bubble’. Children aged 7 and upwards could join Sharing Circles led by a therapist. Using creative media, story and enactment in well- structured ways children would be able to give expression to their own experiences and feelings alongside sharing those of their friends. One of the many benefits of this approach is that the children will bear witness to each other’s experiences and create a shared autobiographical narrative of the times ‘we are living through together’.
These are challenging times. They offer unique opportunities to rethink our approaches to working with children and young people. In less than 3 months we have achieved changes in therapeutic practice that would have previously been seen as out of the question, impossible and undesirable for either professional or operational reasons. We have walked through that wall and found ourselves in an admittedly alien environment, but definitely one that it is possible to inhabit in all good conscience. Now we need to claw back those hundreds of hours that have been lost. Working in partnership with schools and colleges therapists to move beyond the barriers that are leaving so many children unable to grasp hold of what we are longing to give.