The lifting of the Covid-19 lockdown in the third year of the coronavirus pandemic has seen the best of us resent returning to physical work and children are more than justified to feel overwhelmed with the same transition of resuming school. While adults dealt with the new norm of work-from-home and the job insecurities that followed the varied lockdowns, children too were left to deal with adapting from physical school to a purely indoor and online setup and the last two years have left them confused hence, going back to school has seen many children now expressing in the form of behavioural issues.
In an interview with HT Lifestyle, Dr Khushboo Thakker Garodia, Homeopath, Trichologist, Nutrition and Stress Management Expert, shared, “In the absence of school, playgrounds and a lot of other group activities during the pandemic – children especially the very young ones accepted that as normal. 0-4 is the age when the maximum development of social and communication skills happen and due to the lockdown, the children were confined to their homes with no interaction with the outside world, no school, no stimulation for language. So now as they start going back to school we can see signs of social anxiety in them along with communication issues – This is often presented as tantrums bordering towards aggression. Even older children have experienced the same.”
Managing in a less than ideal situation, endless tantrums, scoffs, yells, sniffles of children refusing to be dragged from their comfort zone, the monitor and attending physical school, has all been an endless nightmare for many parents. Couple it with their professional deadlines, it seemed an endless dark pit and they realised that when circumstances weren’t normal, parenting won’t be normal.
What sets children off?
According to Dr Aarti Bakshi, Developmental Psychologist and SEL Consultant at SAAR Education, “Tantrums occur when they’re irritated by a problem that’s too big for them. They haven’t yet learned how to control their impulses or work out conflicts in socially acceptable ways.” Echoing the same, Dr Khushboo Thakker Garodia revealed, “Tantrums happen because children are unable to accept the change and cannot communicate their needs and feelings – including the fact that now suddenly they have to leave their house, their parents and spend a few hours in a new place with a lot of new faces, so they might get frustrated. So simply put, tantrums are one of the ways that young children express and manage feelings, and try to understand or change what’s going on around them.”