After witnessing the downfall trend in the daily COVID-19 cases, state governments across the country started reopening schools following long combat with the pandemic for two years. While it heaved a sigh of relief for parents and educational authorities, children are struggling to re-adjust to their new schedules, as many young children have developed social anxiety during the period of online classes. Apart from missing the presence of their parents during school time, many children are hesitating in interacting with their teachers and peer group.
This social anxiety shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, for the last two years, children were continuously reminded to maintain social distancing. And now this precautionary activity has transformed into an introvert habit for many, moreover, difficulty levels have increased for children who already had social anxiety before the pandemic hit the world.
Here are a few tips for parents to ease back-to-school-anxiety of their children and help them re-adjust to the social life:
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Lessen expectations, increase understanding
If you are a parent and your child is going through a similar situation, then you must start by lowering your expectations from your little ones, and understand that like any other skill such as dancing or singing, social skills also get rusty when we don’t practice it regularly. So, having expectations from your kids will only increase the burden on them.
Once you have understood the struggle of your child, you must increase the normal activities in a safe and sensitive way. For example, you can go to a park with your kid and spend some time with other people.
Highlight the importance of independency in front of your kid, and this can be done by practicing small periods of separation. For an instance, send your kid for playtime with other kids of the neighbour. This practice must be done with children who are facing trouble in separating from their parents.
Start conversing and interacting more with your children. You must make them aware of social anxiety. And also, your kids should know that the feelings of social anxiety that they are going through is completely normal.
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