Ella Selak Bagarić, a psychologist from the Zagreb Child and Youth Protection Center, was a guest on the show, “Pogled preko granice” (“View across the border”), on HTV on 1 September 2020, to discuss the beginning of the school year during the COVID pandemic.

The Coronavirus, migrant crisis, and now this stress before the school year, is it all too much for students and their parents?

We can say that every beginning of the school year usually brings some stress and is demanding for both teachers and parents and students. What is really specific for all of us today is that this situation requires adjustment. It requires clear information. It requires taking responsibility for both teachers and parents, and for everything that awaits children these days. 

How do you deal with this amount of stress? Who can best instruct us in this? 

Now the emphasis is on the fact that children have to go back to school, in fact, they have to continue with their education. What we must not forget in the whole story is how these children are. Today, children in Croatia and in BiH, have actually experienced a number of stressful events. Children around the world have. What is specific to Zagreb, and I know that in BiH some similar situations have caused stressed, is that it has been happening for a long time and is a cumulative effect of a series of changes, a series of instabilities, a series of uncertainties that then certainly affect how children feel. The beginning of the school year brings some new demands on children, which children usually do not have during the summer holidays when they can sleep longer, when they do not have to take care of some obligations, when parents are more relaxed if they are on vacation, when they do not have to take care of whether the child is learning or writing homework. So the very situation of starting school will bring stress to the whole family, and now this situation in which parents have to explain to their children what will happen, what will be different when they return to school, all this requires that we adults do not put in front of the children only demands to learn. It is our responsibility to look at how children are coping with the whole situation. Children react individually. Some children will withdraw, and most children will have difficulty concentrating and maintaining attention because they have had online classes or because this period when there were no classes has been much longer. Some circumstances have changed because they no longer sit on a bench with their friend. That is something we have to take care of. What we know from the experience of some other epidemics and pandemics is that when quarantine occurs, one-third of children show symptoms from the PTSD cycle. This is not a question of some small, stressful circumstances, this is a question of the importance of mental health. If we don’t take care of kids now, we’re going to have a lot more difficulty with them later, and bigger problems than school performance. Today we do not have children at risk – all our children are at risk, because all children are experiencing the same thing we are experiencing. We walk around with masks. They don’t go to their friends on birthdays. They see grandma and grandpa on video and know that they might not go to grandma’s for lunch because grandma is a lung patient, etc. So there’s a lot of change there. We cannot talk about the existence of some risky children. There are some children who are more vulnerable, with whom we may see difficulties sooner, and we will look at them sooner. What we must not allow is that we do not take care of each child individually. We must also take into account that parents are very important to children. For some, their parents have lost their jobs and they are afraid that they will not survive all of this. This certainly creates a difficult climate for the child, and anyone who works with children must take care of this. 

Do you cooperate and consult with colleagues from BiH? Do you share experiences? What do they say are the most pronounced needs of children at this time?

We work together. We hear each other both formally and informally. I can say that it seems to me that the needs of children are the same wherever they live, wherever they are. What children and parents and teachers certainly need is clear information. Parents in every country should receive clear instructions on how to talk to their children about what awaits them now. We can’t tell kids 'you can’t play in the hallways or on the playground' without telling them what they can do. So we have to offer them one alternation and say, 'You go to school and there will surely be a lot of things that are different. And you won’t be able to play the way you used to play. But activities of one kind or another will be provided. You will see your professors, you have the opportunity to learn something new, and together we will stick to the measures that are now very important to preserve health. Health comes first.'

What did online teaching bring to students? What did they lose and what did they gain?

I would say that we all had an experience that was not so negative. We had one digitalisation during the COVID pandemic, and we learned a lot that we didn’t know how to do before. We benefit from the fact that these generations are really digital generations. It is more natural for children than for us, so they did not think any worse of it. But for sure, what we see they lack is one sense of community, one feeling – to go to school: this is my class, these are my teachers. And there’s no interaction. I don’t know what your experience is, but when I talk to colleagues, everyone says the kids didn’t even go to online school because they turned on the recorder, slept longer and looked at it later. One discipline is missing. And parents who have to go to work don’t know what the child is doing and don’t have the ability to provide the child with care at home. So it’s certainly something the kids have lost. We do not know what will happen in three months, and I think it is important that we tell children very openly and honestly that we will find the best way to deal with the situation we are in, and that they are not alone. And in order for parents to be able to say that, in fact, the state must provide clear information about what will happen.

Source: Croatian Radiotelevision https://glashrvatske.hrt.hr/hr/multimedija/pogled-preko-granice-hrvati-u...

Disclaimer: This is unofficial translation provided for informational purposes. Zagreb Child and Youth Protection Center cannot be held legally responsible for any translation inaccuracy.   

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