Coronavirus: Families not yet free from the restriction of fear

When daughter Poppy started sobbing ‘my heart is breaking’ during Melbourne’s lockdown, Chloe Tysoe hit her toughest psychological patch of the pandemic.

Chloe Tysoe with daughters Poppy and Cedah enjoy a day out at a playground in South Yarra. Picture: Aaron Francis

When five-year-old daughter Poppy started regularly curling up in a ball and sobbing the words “my heart is breaking” during Melbourne’s stage-four lockdown, Chloe Tysoe hit her toughest psychological patch of the pandemic.

COVID-19 cost Ms Tysoe her full-time job as an optical dispenser in May, but seeing her older daughter unable to adjust to life constantly at home and apart from her preschool friends was extremely hard to handle.

“It was triggering for me,” Ms Tysoe said. “We had to pull Poppy out of daycare because of the stage-four restrictions. She missed her friends, and by the end of the second week there was a massive shift in behaviour.

“Poppy became intensely frustrated at the tiniest things. She’d shriek and curl up into a ball and say she was having a bad day but no one understood. She’d say ‘my heart is breaking’.”

Ms Tysoe said the situation reached a point where she didn’t feel she could take Poppy or three- year-old sister Cedah out of the house even for the essential tasks allowed under lockdown, like grocery shopping. It became exhausting. “Holding her and comforting her just wasn’t enough. It seemed like so many emotions were going through her head at once,” Ms Tysoe said.

After seeing a GP, Poppy was diagnosed with serious anxiety. She now has weekly sessions with a counsellor and is doing better, though the family plan to shortly return to Sydney to live, where they will have more support from relatives. “We’re having to relocate interstate because of the effect this lockdown has had on us as a family,” Ms Tysoe said.

Medical practitioners have noted mothers of young children in Melbourne are presenting for support as they struggle over returning to playgrounds or shared spaces amid fears they are exposing their children to the virus.

Ms Tysoe said it had been “really overwhelming” to try to bring Poppy back into normal social situations, and there was a general sense of unease about putting her children in communal areas.

“At the moment I feel pretty comfortable about the low case numbers, but the possibility of COVID is certainly still in the back of my head when I’m out with the kids. There’s that constant worry, the constant ‘what if?’,” she said.

“It does make you more reserved about them mixing with other kids at the playground. You say ‘just play with your sister’. But it doesn’t make you feel very good … you’re supposed to be encouraging them to play with others to develop social skills … but at the moment you just don’t want to take that risk to the family.”