Help your child to feel good about returning to school

It’s important to recognize the important role that you, as the adult, have to play in setting the emotional tone for your child and your family. You have the opportunity to help your child to hold on to hope during a really challenging time, and to feel good about returning to school.

​A key first step is to acknowledge and work through your own feelings of anxiety about your child’s return to school. Maybe you’re worried about the physical safety of your kindergartener or the mental wellbeing of your teenager. If you can pinpoint the source of your underlying worry, you may be able to find a way to deal with the issue or to seek some additional support for yourself. Your goal is to get to a place where you can feel calm, confident, and positive when you talk to your child about heading back to school. That doesn’t mean that you’re trying to erase the worry: you’re simply trying to make it a little more manageable.

Know that you’re not alone in “feeling all the feelings” this back-to-school season.  A lot of parents are feeling extra worried this year. One way to manage that worry is by reaching out to other people for support—perhaps chatting with a friend via a Zoom

Look for opportunities to normalize the back-to-school experience as much as possible. Yes, it’s going to be an extra challenging back-to-school season, but that doesn’t have to rob the experience of all of its joy. Look for opportunities to help your child to recognize that there are still things to look forward to—perhaps reconnecting with friends or a favourite teacher.

Help your child to ease back into school-year routines. Routines are important. They help us to feel grounded and secure—which means they’re needed more than ever, right now. Transitioning back to a school-year routine won’t be easy after six months of relatively unscheduled pandemic living, so you might want to tackle it in stages, gradually shifting bedtimes and wakeup times, dialing back the amount of screen time, and ensuring that mealtimes are happening at predictable times. It might also be a good idea to talk about the challenges of being apart from other family members, after six months of “bubbling” together. If this is the case for your child, you might want to help your child to identify ways of feeling supported and connected by you, even when the two of you are physically apart.
It’s important to recognize the important role that you, as the adult, have to play in setting the emotional tone for your child and your family. You have the opportunity to help your child to hold on to hope during a really challenging time, and to feel good about returning to school.

It’s important to acknowledge the fact that not every kid is going to be excited about heading back to school. Some might even experience a heightened level of school refusal and/or separation anxiety.
Express confidence in your child’s ability to handle what is admittedly a very challenging situation. Remind your child that they’ve been through hard things before and they managed to make it through—and that they don’t have to handle this on their own. There are people who care about them, both at home and at school. We can we weather the challenges togather.

Source: Family Care Center  of Ontario  ​https://www.family.cmho.org/ 

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