Pandemic fun police need to guard children’s mental health and take it more seriously

Teenagers are having a tough enough time, without the pandemic fun police spoiling every rite of passage, argues Natasha Bita.

“Everything we look forward to has been cancelled.’’

This cry from the heart, from one of the distraught children who made 433,000 calls to Kids Helpline last year, spells out how the COVID-19 crisis – and the pandemic fun police – are harming the mental health of Australian kids.

Senior students were thrown a curve ball when classrooms closed for weeks on end last year, on the home stretch of the toughest and most competitive year of schooling.

The pandemic is causing high anxiety among Australian children, who worry their grandparents might die from COVID-19, or that parents could lose their job during a lockdown. They worry they’ll fail exams, they worry they won’t find work and they worry their 18th birthday party will be cancelled.

All the adolescent rites of passage – sport, parties, end-of-year formals, family holidays, schoolies celebrations, 18th birthday festivities, school camps and excursions, first jobs and gap-year backpacking adventures – have been restricted, if not cancelled.

Children cooped up with highly stressed, cranky and sometimes violent parents are spending more time online, where they’re targeted by paedophiles and vulnerable to bullying.

Let’s give the kids a break.

Risk-averse adults who want to shut down entire cities and place children in a form of home detention to protect the “vulnerable” from the virus need to understand that children are vulnerable, too.

It’s selfish to let COVID-19 rip through the community and infect the elderly.

But it’s also selfish to harm children’s mental health by denying them the freedom to play and socialise, through heavy-handed lockdowns that are disproportionate to the real risk of spreading the virus.

Outside Melbourne, where classrooms will shut down this week due to yet another quarantine stuff-up by the Andrews government, schools seem to be back to business-as-usual.

Principals say they’re concerned that highly anxious students are self-harming, yet continue to pile on the pressure for academic performance, and dish out detentions for quirky hairstyles or the wrong-coloured socks.

In Queensland, many schools had the bright idea last week of predicting Year 12 students’ ATAR scores for university entrance, based on unusually poor Year 11 results after many students fell behind during the home schooling experiment in April. How is that supposed to help students’ confidence and mental health?

It’s high time that schools start to take student wellbeing as seriously as academic results, as recommended in the recent Productivity Commission report into mental health.

And politicians need to take youth suicide as seriously as a COVID-19 death, when deciding how to respond to a pandemic that could well be with us for years to come.

Children are our future, and they have a right to be happy and healthy too.

THOSE WHO NEED HELP, PLEASE CONTACT:

Kids Helpline | 1800 55 1800

HEADSPACE https://headspace.org.au/eheadspace/

REACHOUT https://au.reachout.com/