'We’re shouting for the children in our care': Back-to-school anxiety is not just for the kids

There’s been an increase in the numbers of both adults and children presenting to mental health services since the pandemic started, according to clinical psychologist Dr Vincent McDarby.

“Oh, I can’t have her at home again. I cried at Christmas when they said they were keeping the schools closed,” says Sarah McCrann, 43, whose daughter is starting Senior Infants. 

“I’m looking forward to her going back to school – I just want it to be without risking her lifetime health.” 

The government has been consistent all summer in its messaging about the schools opening as usual this autumn – a relief to many parents, who have struggled through a summer of limited camps and other support. But with the Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus ripping through our communities, many have mixed feelings about the return to school.

“I don’t trust the Department of Education in this at all,” Sarah continues. 

“I don’t feel the situation has been evaluated properly in light of the Delta variant. I get the feeling that because adults are vaccinated, the government think it’s grand. But we can’t vaccinate our kids. It’s the long-Covid business that terrifies me – we should be trying to protect the kids from getting it.” 

Sinéad Kavanagh, a 39-year-old primary teacher and mother of two, has similar concerns. “I know what classroom settings are like. We’ve always had pods and bubbles, but they’re mixing in the line and in yard. If it got into a class, I’d worry it would just rip through it,” she says. 

“I’m not worried about mortality, I’m worried about long-Covid. And I worry about my son bringing it home, because my dad has cancer and is vulnerable.” 

Sinéad will be teaching 6th class, but she isn’t worried for herself. “Some students are vaccinated, some aren’t – but I don’t think many teachers worry anymore, because we’re masked and most of us vaccinated.” But she did go online to see what it would cost to buy a CO2 monitor for her own classroom. “Supposedly schools need to have CO2 monitors, but they’re shared between classes,” she says.

Sinéad and her husband are very careful with what they say at home, in order to protect their children. “But they hear it everywhere, people are talking about it on the radio and on the road. My son did say, ‘Mam, I’m really scared of getting Covid’,” she says.

There’s been an increase in the numbers of both adults and children presenting to mental health services since the pandemic started, according to Dr. Vincent McDarby, Clinical Psychologist with the Psychological Society of Ireland. 

Children have been presenting with anxiety in particular, and the biggest spikes were whenever the schools were opening again after a longer break.

“It’s not surprising. Everybody thought that the hardest bit would be the middle of lockdown when people were bombarded with information about Covid, hospital numbers, deaths and so on. And yes, that causes a degree of anxiety, but the behaviours we were engaging in were safety behaviours,” he says. 

“When we’re experiencing trauma, we try to make our world small, safe and secure, and we do that to make it predictable. Anxiety is about unpredictability. So we make the world small until we recover, and then occasionally, people can have difficulties and feel anxious when things are getting back to normal.” 

The government telling us to stay at home, in other words, meant that we were put in what felt like safe zones for a very long time – and a lot of children felt very safe in that, Dr. McDarby explains. “All of a sudden, they had to leave all that and go back to school. That’s the anxiety – particularly with so much back and forth.” 

While it is children who have represented the spikes in cases around the back-to-school dates, seeing their children distressed naturally makes parents distressed, acknowledges Dr. McDarby. As for concerns about the virus this time around, anxiety is “a normal reaction to an abnormal situation”, he says. 

“We have a tendency to pathologise, but this is a normal reaction. There’s so much uncertainty, and again, anxiety comes back to that.” For Jenni Owen-Thomas, a 39-year-old mother of two, uncertainty is very much a part of the problem. 

“I was quite anxious at the beginning of the pandemic, but the more I learnt about Covid, the more my fears eased,” she says, explaining that her two sons, who are six and almost nine, are taking immunosuppressants for their chronic eczema.

“This medication has been life-changing for us, but the Delta variant being so much more contagious than previous variants has impacted on my concerns,” she continues. 

“I don’t know how they would cope with Covid when their immune system isn’t as strong as others’. I also don’t know, if vaccines do become available for children, whether the vaccine will work for them.” Her eldest, says Jenni, can be “a bit of a worrier”, so she is mindful of keeping her concerns to herself. 

“This year and a half has been hard enough on them, so I will be treating this as if it were any other September as much as possible,” she says. “I won’t be shouting for them to close the schools. I saw the difference in them when they got back to school, and I can see how much they need it.” That appears to be crux of the situation: that parents want their children in school, but many feel that the schools are unsafe as things stand. 

“Teachers aren’t asking not to work. Nobody wants the schools to close, but we’re shouting for the children in our care,” stresses Sinéad. What she’d like is more of a discussion about solutions, especially in light of stories from Canada and parts of the US about high rates of both transmission and long-Covid among children.

“Children have done their part, they stayed at home and gave up so much. Now we’re protected and it’s our turn to protect them,” she says. “Let’s be honest: they’re not going to reduce class sizes. I think in addition to open windows, we need air filtration systems and CO2 monitors for every class. I’m not sure how I feel about masks in primary school – maybe in the senior years.” 

Clear guidance from NPHET and data to indicate that the Delta variant doesn’t badly affect children are among the things that might reassure Sarah. “Air purifiers maybe, I don’t know – I just think they’re planning the same thing as last year for a considerably more transmissible, airborne disease,” she says, adding that what she felt to be dishonest communication around Christmas didn’t help. 

“Back when it was obvious to everyone that the schools would have to remain closed, and they kept insisting that they would open – that was really, really frustrating.” Dr. McDarcy admits that it’s a naturally difficult situation for the government to be in. 

“It’s about trying to give certainty in a very fluid, unpredictable situation. I can understand why the government haven’t been able to give certainty, and I can understand that that’s an issue to parents.” But while worrying is perfectly natural, he encourages parents to watch their own anxiety and stress levels. “If I’m on an airplane and we hit turbulence, I look at the cabin crew. If they’re unperturbed, I relax – but if they grab the oxygen masks, I panic,” he explains. 

“Children do that with adults. They spend so much time looking to their parents to learn, so they notice changes to our body language and our tone of voice and know when something’s off.” Taking a step back from negative news reporting about the pandemic can be a good place to start. 

“We can end up reading so much that our views become skewed,” says Dr. McDarcy. “There’s a tendency to click into the most negatively sensational news stories, so it can be beneficial to step away.” His advice to parents of worried children is to validate their feelings. “Our natural reaction is to say ‘don’t worry’, but what we communicate then is that we don’t want to talk about it. 

"It’s better to help kids label their emotions, to normalise them and process with them. By sitting down with your child and validating their worries, we can become the rational voice that isn’t there when they’re ruminating.”