Children, Prone to Anxiety, Great Sufferers due to COVID-19: Pune Schools' Director to Parents

Pune, March 17, 2020:

In the midst of the outbreak of the viral pandemic coronavirus that has terrorized the entire nation, the children, who are seeing something like this unfold in front of their eyes, could be the greatest sufferers. Yes, you read correctly. Children, because they are naive and impressionable, tend to carry traumas for several years and they tend to remember things long long after the adults have forgotten.

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Now, with the advent of the coronavirus, the children have once again been subjected to a great psychological scarring, the likes of which has not been known in recent memory. In years of yore, when the Black Plague swept Europe in medieval times, and when the Spanish Flu wreaked havoc once again circa 1918, the records of children's emotional assessment was not made. Now, however, in an era when child psychology has become an increasingly common subject of study, it becomes pertinent for us to examine the effects of the pandemic on child phyches.

To address the fears, the director of Sanskriti Group of Schools in Pune, Devyani Mungali, has issued a message to parents in the wake of the outbreak. At a time when there is a mad scramble for masks and hand sanitizers in the market, the Director's message to the students hints at a more mature response to the disease, especially when it comes to dealing with the disease. In the missive, she points out that the mad phobia that seems to have taken over the adult demographic does not negatively impact the more impressionable and vulnerable children.

She writes, "We at Sanskriti are especially concerned about the possible impact on the minds of our young children of all this overload of information and misinformation on TV and social media." The note further states that they children, who will receive an overload of information, "can be particularly vulnerable to feelings of anxiety, stress and in some cases sadness."

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The Director states that since children, in most cases will consciously/sub-consciously off the reactions of their parents, being "calm around them and not overly displaying anxiety is a great start to help allay their worry."

Mungali also advises that since the older children will most likely receive an overload of information, they must not be fed this and be allowed to only monitor authentic sources of news. The parents should also convey to their wards they they are committed to keeping the children safe. Additionally, they should teach the children proper hygiene so that they can keep themselves safe/vigilant.

The note issued by the Pune organization has now become viral on social media and is being widely shared by parents who are in a fix as to how to best deal with the very pressing situation. Although Maharashtra has been ravaged by the pandemic (with 39 cases being reported as pf yet) and all the schools in the state are in high-alert, the situation in the Northeast is also not much different. Here, several of the states have closed down their schools as preventive measures against the pandemic.

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