Remote learning will likely play a role in students’ lives once schools reopen. Here’s how teachers and parents can help kids manage stress, build resilience, and stay connected.
As the pandemic grinds on and protests against police brutality and systemic racism continue, young people are coping with high levels of stress and uncertainty, writes Dr. Pamela Cantor in “The Stress of This Moment Might Be Hurting Kids’ Development” for Education Next. With the likelihood that remote learning will continue in some form this fall, many children will once more be separated from the support systems that help balance their lives by keeping them connected to routines—and to the people outside their immediate families who care about them. It’s a difficult set of circumstances that Cantor, founder and senior science advisor of Turnaround for Children, calls “the Covid-19 paradox.”
“In order to be safe and keep others safe from the virus, we must be physically distant. But that means disrupting the communities and relationships in our lives—classrooms, teachers, teams, coaches, churches, friends, extended families—that are the very connections we need to feel safe, to cope with stress, and to surmount this crisis,” writes Cantor. “On top of this, there is a crisis of trust, particularly for young people of color, because of what they are witnessing: Officers who should protect them, but don’t, won’t, or can’t.”
When people experience stress, the hormone cortisol is released in the body, producing the fight, flight, or freeze impulse. Some stress may be useful in preparing kids for challenging tasks like tests and performances. “This is the limbic system in the brain at work—attention, concentration, focus, memory, preparation,” writes Cantor. But persistently high levels of stress can become toxic, affecting attention and memory. The hormone oxytocin, however, can help protect children from these harmful effects. “Relationships that are strong and positive cause oxytocin’s release, which helps produce feelings of trust, love, attachment, and safety,” Cantor writes. “This not only helps children manage stress, but also offsets the damaging effects of cortisol and produces resilience to future stress.”
As students head back to school this fall with the possibility of hybrid learning models and rolling school closures, educators and parents will play an important role in helping to “inoculate us against the intolerable stress of the scary, uncertain world we now live in,” she writes. Cantor suggests adults focus on a new take on the “Three Rs”: relationships, routines, and resilience.
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