It's not all physical

                                                        It’s not all physical

 

Kids are back in school.  Well not exactly, mostly they are back in school virtually or online.  The purpose of keeping children out of school is protect their physical health.

But what about the damage to their mental health.   Now that students have  been home for months and away from their peers, there are increasing indicators that children’s mental health is suffering.

Children need consistency of schedules, predictable rules and consequences, and set expectations.   These conditions teach children how to behave, develop self-discipline and impulse control.   Without these guiderails, therapists are seeing an increase in behavioral problems in their pediatric clients.   Having these guidelines is much easier within a school setting.  Children are used to having these kinds of rules consistently enforced and they see themselves and their peers being held to the same standards.

Parenting is not this rigid.  And parents are often juggling work expectations at home, multiple children at different ages as well as the child receiving online instruction.

There are indicators that too much alone at home time is starting to risk a child’s mental health.  One of the first indicators is that the child is more withdrawn than usual.  This issue can be observed when a child withdraws from family and retreats into more screen time with animation, games and non-human interactions.

Families should also monitor eating and sleeping patterns.  Is the child eating or sleeping at the patterns that differ from pre-virus days? Sleeping patterns can have the child up late with screen time, sleeping irregularly and then not wanting to get up.  Everyone seems to have gained weight staying home so much but is the child eating noticeably more or less than usual?

Probably all of us are a bit irritable because of the changes in our lives.   But if a child seems to demonstrate a low mood or being irritable over an extended period of time, it is important to do a mental health check in with the child’s physician.  The same is true if a child seems disinterested in activities that used to engage him or her.

This virus is supposed to be a physical virus, but if we ever needed more evidence that the body and mind work as one, this is it.  It's not all physical.

Kids are just collateral damage

 Kids are just collateral damage

 

Our society keeps telling everyone who will listen that we really care about children.  Fact is, it is behavior that shows what we really care about.  And based on our behavior we don’t care about children much at all.

Babies are born drug addicted, damaged with fetal alcohol syndrome and/or tobacco use and our society does not hold the mother in the least bit accountable for the lasting damage to that child’s life.  Males create multiple children with multiple females for whom they have neither the intention nor the capability to actually “father" these children they have created.  Yet, there are no consequences for these behaviors.  At least not to the male who “fathered” the child.  There are lots of consequences to the child.

Families want to adopt these children, but they cannot without the biological parent allowing the adoption and giving up custody.   Our social services agencies are addicted to the fiction that kids are always better with biological parents so these people are given multiple chances to clean up their acts so they can regain custody of the child.  In the meantime, the child gets to bounce from foster home to foster home belonging to everyone and to no one.

By the time these kids become teens their lives are often in disarray, turning to street gangs for the nurturing and sense of belonging they should be getting from families.   Then we start pouring millions of dollars to save them from the one-way ticket from school to jail.  By that time the train has left the station and the barn door cannot be locked.   When these children needed society’s intervention, society was busy protecting the rights of the adults, the children were the leftovers.

And our disregard for children extends to the professionals who care for their needs.  Otherwise well-paid professionals earn less if they earn their money caring for children.  Pediatricians, child-psychologists, child social workers all earn less than the adult serving counterpart.  We all know about teachers.   

School staff are mandated reporters for child abuse.  Yet when they call Child Protective Services to report a concern, they are just as likely to get a recorded message as they are to be able to speak with a social worker.  Child protective services agencies are understaffed and over worked.  They can’t begin to do the job they need to do.  But it doesn’t matter because they only serve kids and children can’t vote.

Every child deserves a loving family, food security, a safe neighborhood free from fear, and stable housing.  As a society we speak good words, but kids are just the collateral damage because above all, we need to take care of adult rights and the collateral damage to children be damned.

Twice Baked

 Twice Baked

Most folks get that distance learning is at some level an oxymoron.   There is an inverse relationship between distance and learning.  The more distance, the less learning.  Teachers need to be able to reach out and touch a child.   Technology is a wonderful thing but it does not replace hands on learning.  Children with disabilities are even more greatly impacted.   Kids who struggle to read are not great candidates for screen time learning.   It’s difficult enough to sustain their attention in a classroom let alone on the screen of a tablet.   

Pundits tell us these are about to be boom times for private schools as parents of plain children look at small private schools as a serious option.   Some families have even joined to create “COVID pods”.  When several families join and hire a teacher who they set up in a learning pod in someone’s backyard. 

Day care centers are jumping on the bandwagon.   Some are offering online tutoring and monitoring of school work in addition to day care while parents go back to work. 

But all of these plans cost money.   And probably won’t work for kids with disabilities.  

Exceptional learners are already being burned by the ineffectiveness of distance learning in meeting their needs.   They get burned again if they are in a family of modest means.   And the alternative options that work for plain kids don’t work for students with special learning challenges even if their parents had the money.  It seems that the federal and state requirements that children with disabilities receive a free, appropriate education has been all but forgotten. 

More seriously learning challenged students are getting next to nothing from online learning.  Why can’t these small numbers of students be brought into carefully sanitized buildings where they can receive in-person instruction?

How many times do children with disabilities have to be burned?   They are not potatoes that improve with a second baking.

 

 

Do teachers have a point?

Do Teachers Unions Have a Point?

 

Teachers unions have come out strongly against schools opening up again for in-school learning, even part time in some sort of hybrid approach.   A recent newspaper article quoted the superintendent for Catholic education in the Baltimore region as saying that Catholic schools would open full time because it was in the best interest of the students.

The teachers’ unions are saying that schools are not safe for teachers.   These concerns need to be considered in light of the fact that the teachers in the unions teach in public schools not private ones, whether parochial or private non-sectarian.   However, it is interesting to note that the unions are mainly addressing concerns about teacher safety not about best interests of kids.

Articles about health care professionals who have continually gone into the hospitals and other medical facilities have repeatedly said they do so because that is what they signed up to do- take care of the sick.  And they understand that in doing so they are putting themselves at risk.

Teachers have signed up to provide an education for children.   Granted they did not sign up to put themselves at a health risk but they did sign up to teach.   Everyone knows that online learning is an oxymoron.   Many kids don’t have the facilities to get online and most people agree there was very little learning that was occurring.  The American Pediatric Association has said that kids are more damaged by not being in-school than the risk to their health in school, providing health care measures are taken. 

The question becomes just how great is the health risk to teachers who would return part-time to a school building?   As of this writing, Maryland has had 3493 people die of the Covid 19 virus.   Of that number 57% were the elderly who were in nursing homes.  It is probably fair to assume that an individual in a nursing home had some pre-existing medical condition that caused them to need a nursing home even before the virus.  That means 1493 people have died in Maryland from the virus who were not already in compromised health in a nursing home.   

These numbers beg the question of how great is the risk to classroom teachers?  Being sick with the virus ranges from bad to really  bad.   No one wants that for teachers, for kids or for any one.  

Teaching online takes a lot less time than being in a classroom.  A chunk of the learning is canned and requires little to no preparation.   Do teachers really have a legitimate health risk if they go into a school building part-time?  How many of those same teachers have traveled or vacationed in another higher risk state this summer?  Do teachers’ unions have a point?   Or are their members less committed to their commitment to teach than are health care workers to their commitment to keep us well.  It’s a good question.