Stay Safe!

Fun: Children need to have fun to stay resilient, active, engaged, and hopeful. From a child’s perspective, daily fun is essential. Craft structured or spontaneous daily fun activities with the family, a few trusted friends, and teachers to re-invigorate your children with enthusiasm and laughter. Treasure hunts, scavenger hunts, balloon tosses, slip and slides, sprinklers, magic and talent shows, and costume parties are simple but fun ways to breathe life back into kids. For teenagers, support their small social circles, their romantic relationships, safe outdoor sports such as surfing, running, hiking, and camping to gradually re-infuse them with motivation and engagement. If adolescents are connected, motivated, and engaged in fun activities, they are far less likely to use substances or self-harm to escape and cope with their depression and helplessness.
Creativity: Facilitate creative daily projects that allow children to use their imagination. Arts, crafts, mechanics, woodwork, building computers and cars, gardening, magic kits, water play, costumes, sewing, and culinary arts are all good choices to offer your child. Create long lists of options, and create spaces in your garage, bathrooms, kitchens, and backyards for your children to immerse themselves in creative play. For instance, I had one client whose parents described their daughter as a “ghost of a child”; severely depressed and disengaged, she refused to leave the house for days. The parents thought out-of-the-box and had her collect tadpoles from a nearby lagoon. She built “ponds” for them in the backyard to watch them grow into frogs. The child was overjoyed and spent delightful hours with her “new friends.” Creativity is the source of light and joy and can be incredibly therapeutic for children and adolescents.
Hope: It is very important for children to have hope; to look forward to something extraordinary, meaningful, and super-exciting. This can be an effective way to help get their minds out of the fog isolation has brought on and into thoughts of the future. Planning future vacations, visits with family and friends, weekend trips, important events (birthdays, anniversaries, future graduations), can create a sense of movement and the realization that one day, the mundane life of daily chores and online school will come to an end.
Withdrawing to their dark rooms. Being sad and tearful. Refusing to participate in online school meetings. Avoiding and neglecting schoolwork. Spending endless hours alone on social media and watching Netflix and YouTube. Living “vampire lives”—sleeping all day and staying up all night. Being oppositional, irritable, and angry.Being “bored,” disinterested, and disengaged. Refusing to exercise.Using vaping and marijuana to numb themselves. Cutting and scratching their bodies in self-harm. Texting self-loathing or suicidal messages to friends and family.
It’s been a tough year for everyone, but especially for kids. One recent study shows alarming increases in both depression and anxiety in children and adolescents across the globe. In the spring of 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned of a massive surge in mental health issues in the coming months, with mental health-related visits for children ages 5-11 and 12-17 years increasing approximately 24 percent and 31 percent as compared to 2019.