86% of our minors have experienced emotional changes of various kinds during this pandemic, According to a The results tell us that:
- In 69.9% of the cases the presence of negative or unpleasant emotions.
- 31% had sleep problems.
- 24.1% developed behavior problems.
Understanding why the pandemic has had such an impact on them and the repercussions it may have on their emotional development will allow us to help them redirect their discomfort to prevent them from degenerating into situations of emotional and social isolation, and it will also show us that we should comfort them and help them to face their fears, anxieties, anxieties, feelings of loss and concerns in dealing with these difficult transitions.
Why children have suffered so much stress during the pandemic
Throughout these months we have all gone through an extraordinary pandemic scenario characterized by living immersed in high levels of uncertainty, worry and bewilderment.
We did not know what was going to happen or how our future was going to be when we were questioned constantly to seek new ways of coping and adaptation.
The most immediate consequence of this accelerated adaptive process is that it was characterized by a significant increase in stressors.
Currently it is known that one of the groups most affected in their emotional well-being are children and adolescents. Because?
- They suffered a double impact on a psychological level and a decrease in material resources
As we said, this double impact is related at the psychological level as well as at the level of differential material resources that compromised both their affective and academic development.
And several factors were added:
- The impact of the confinement experience.
- The decline in their academic performance related to different starting situations of the families, both in coping resources and in socioeconomic ones.
These last material deficiencies made it very difficult for a good part of the students to have adequate access to school content, as the organization already stated in its report Save The Children.
- They experienced a struggle: between fear and the need for socialization
The nature of the internal emotional tensions that our students harbored within them was a bitter struggle between the fear of contagion from oneself and from their elders and the urgent need to go out and interact with their peers because only in this way did they find that they could develop adequately in this vital stage that was so important to them.
- Overnight his lifestyle was radically altered. and they suffered a vital break in their daily habits, they stopped being able to see their friends and teachers.
- They gave up hugging their grandparents and relatives who showered them with love and attention while providing them with a warm feeling of security.
- Many of them they were involuntary witnesses in their families of anguishing deaths, illness situations and suffering, Amen to Ertes, layoffs and economic concerns.
All these elements of risk in their emotional development that fractured the necessary feeling of internal security and caused emotional suffering.
Can stress affect the emotional development of minors?
A new study directed by Juan Nácher, professor of Biology at the University of Valencia and published in the journal Neurology of Stress (2021), suggests that adverse and negative experiences during the first years of life compromise the development of certain brain regions, especially the area of the prefrontal cortex which is related to the modulation of emotions and emotional self-regulation.
It appears that subjecting people to prolonged stress in late childhood and adolescence alters the so-called inhibitory neurons related to the control and synchronization of neural networks of our brain and that it would act as a predisposing factor in the development of certain psychiatric pathologies.
The good news is that, curiously, a group of students who were trained in emotional self-regulation skills for development in another ongoing study prior to the pandemic emergency saw how they helped significantly to dampen the negative emotions associated with the pandemic context.
That is to say, being trained in a skill of the prefrontal cortex, which in turn is the most altered under situations of continuous stress, acted as a robust protection factor against excessive and prolonged stress over time.
All this leads to thinking about the vital importance of implementing early psychological prevention and intervention strategies to defuse the impact of negative emotions associated with the pandemic and contribute to its modulation.
What to do so that stress does not wreak havoc in children and adolescents?
The essential thing in this situation is that these stressors, especially those that affect the earliest stages of life, can be adequately addressed to nullify or reduce their negative impact. For this, it is especially important to provide them with the adequate coping tools.
- Can offer support actual emotional.
- Promote security contexts and trust to help.
- Collaborate with their families and the educational community so that our children and adolescents feel firmly that their needs can be welcomed and understood in a warm and empathetic way and that above all we are there to help them tolerate and manage frustrations associated with the pandemic context, such as managing distance physical and social restrictions.
- Can accompany them and help to redirect their discomfort.
Only by offering the right help when they need it will we make them resilient and they will be able to successfully adapt to adversity.
As Tfofa Said (2018) “We must act in life not ignoring the dangers, the risks or the negative aspects but deepening our vision of the negative to extract a meaning and, at the same time that we work to assimilate it, we must focus on what really matters and where support is needed to stay on course for a successful and meaningful outcome.”
Only in this way will we get our girls, boys and adolescents to talk about the pandemic in the future as a beautiful personal experience difficult but full of wise self-knowledge and realization.