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Cardozo: Parents fighting, teachers crying: Grownup stress is hitting kids hard

 

Alexis, 17, has always been close to her parents. But since the pandemic began, they have been arguing a lot. “We snap at each other more,” she said. “And because there’s more negative emotion with the virus and we’re all trapped in the house together, the stress is definitely amplified.”

Both her parents have been working from their Maryland home since March last year. For most of that time, Alexis’ sister, who has graduated from college, has also been living at home. Last April, their grandmother also came to stay with the family for a while, when the Covid cases in Florida, where she lives, were skyrocketing. Until this past year, Alexis, who has her own bedroom, said she had always thought of her house as “normal” sized.

But with her family at home all the time, seeing each other at every meal, the house began to feel awfully small. Problems that in normal times would blow over instead blew up into conflicts. “That’s a clear memory I have of them just getting very, very upset very quickly,” she said of her parents. “I remember they got extremely, extremely mad.”

Her experiences aren’t unique. The parents of the more than 50 million children who attend public schools in the U.S. are facing an unprecedented amount of stress. They worry about keeping their families healthy and how to juggle work and childcare. Some face financial anxieties because of furloughs or unemployment, and nearly everyone is feeling isolated and lonely.

Teachers are in a similar boat, Alexis has noticed. In her online classes, they can seem on edge. She burst out laughing when she heard that some adults think children don’t notice — and aren’t affected by — how stressed they are. “Parents and teachers aren’t fooling us,” she insisted. “Not even close.”

Jennifer Greif Green, an associate professor in the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development at Boston University, said most of a child’s interactions with adults are with their parents and teachers, “so any disruption to that is really going to have an impact on that whole ecosystem and all those relationships.”

She said that as everyone heals from the disruption of the past year, the education system needs to recognize that adult stress has affected children and must put in place a plan to support adult mental health and rebuild trust in relationships. “When parents and teachers who are around children are doing well and are feeling good, then the children who they’re with will have better mental health and better academic outcomes.”

“We know from decades of research on parent and child relationships, that when, for example, mothers are depressed, children are much more likely to be depressed. And there’s similar research coming out in schools where teachers who are depressed have students who don’t do as well,” Greif Green said.

Adults who are stressed may not pay close attention to the needs of children, she said. And even if adults try to hide it, that stress trickles down to children and affects how they do academically, psychologically and emotionally.

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