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Note: This article appears in the 2021–22 Private School Handbook.
Meredith joined sixth grade at a private school in Clayton in the fall of 2020. It was far different from when she’d toured it the year before. Because of the pandemic, she had to wear a mask and social distance. “You couldn’t see [the other students’] faces, so you couldn’t really see what they were thinking, and no one really was talking to each other,” she recalls. “We were learning more than had we been online, but it didn’t feel like school at first.”
As the pandemic dragged on, some students began to adjust to the circumstances, but they weren’t thriving, she says. Meredith found it took longer than expected to make friends. At one point, she had to stay home for a month due to a COVID-19 exposure scare. “That was probably the worst,” she says.
The pandemic has left a lot of folks in a state of “languishing,” as The New York Times described it in a May 2021 story. “Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness,” wrote best-selling author Adam Grant. “It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.”
At one end of the mental-health spectrum, there’s depression—a sense of despondency and worthlessness—and at the other, flourishing—a sense of peak well-being. Languishing is neither. It’s an absence of well-being characterized by aimlessness and lack of joy.
“It is a common feeling,” says Dr. Timika Edwards, a family psychologist with Psychological Services of St. Louis and Our Little Haven, an early intervention service provider for children and families. “This past year, we all just really had a blurred existence.”
So how can we get our well-being back? One step, suggests Edwards, is to talk about it as a family. It’s important that people have the ability to express how they’re feeling and what they’re going through. She also suggests bringing joy back into your days by planning safe, fun activities.
Ebony Sistrunk, director of academic and college counseling at Lutheran High School South, emphasizes the importance of getting back to a routine, particularly if students are returning to in-person learning after some time away.
“Try to get into the routine of getting up and putting on clothes,” Sistrunk says. “Try not to take a nap during the day; that sleeping piece really did affect a lot of our students.” Schedules may be off: During the early days of the pandemic, one teacher noticed her virtual students were so tired that she started hosting class in the evenings.
Many young children also endured significant stress during the pandemic. Changes in sleeping and eating habits, hyperactivity or agitation, and a tendency to repeatedly ask the same questions are signs of anxiety. Sarah Thomas, a program manager for Our Little Academy Day Treatment—a day program for pre-kindergarten students—says the most important thing for young children is to establish a routine and realize that they might have lost a lot during the pandemic. When her program reopened in June 2020, even after just a few months of lockdown, Thomas noticed that many of the students played alone, despite being back together with peers.
“Kids may really need some practical life skills,” Thomas explains. “Tell them, ‘Ask your friend, will you play with me, please?’ That’s how we do this until they start building those skills back for themselves.”
One parent whose son was in kindergarten at an archdiocesan grade school when the pandemic hit remembers emailing a teacher a few months into virtual learning. “I reached out and was like, ‘I’m just [struggling] here, and my son’s not learning anything. What am I going to do?’” he recalls. The father was juggling a demanding full-time job with helping his son. The teacher was encouraging, reminding the parent that the student was smart, and even if it felt like he wasn’t learning as much, he’d catch up in first grade.
While the losses to young students during the pandemic might seem substantial, experts agree that children are incredibly resilient. “Those skills will come back,” Thomas says.
One mother observed that kind of resiliency from her son, who was in 11th grade at the onset of the pandemic. “The Class of 2021 all deserve a medal in my opinion,” she says. “That group of kids figured out what they were going to do about college,” despite the fact that they couldn’t visit college campuses at the time. “They missed their friends for a whole year. They missed homecomings. They missed Christmas parties. They missed their whole senior year.”
But she also says her son is already focused on what’s ahead.
“I think those of us who parented seniors are having a harder time getting over what was lost than the kids are,” she says. “We all feel a little ripped off. This was supposed to be a huge victory lap, and we didn’t get it either. But as we watch them grow up and pursue their goals and dreams, we’re slowly getting over it, too.”
