I HOPE you have had a happy festive season. It has been markedly different than we hoped – fewer meetings with friends and family, smaller get-togethers, more cancellations, many postponements.
These last two years have been particularly difficult for our youngsters, missing the routine of fixed school terms, holidays, and festivals.
Many children have spent much more time with adults, studying online or entertaining themselves alone whilst their parents and carers worked.
They have perhaps fallen behind in their schooling, many are less fit, and they have most likely heard too many adult conversations and news broadcasts that may have confused and worried them.
With this in mind, we created a game on New Year’s Day, a family conference, the theme ‘challenges and opportunities’.
Having seen and heard their father participating in many Zoom calls, the children embraced the idea.
Flo, seven years old, took to the floor. She and her brother had contracted Covid in the summer; 10 days’ isolation with their father had been a memorable challenge.
She had missed her mother, going to school and seeing her friends, but she smiled broadly, the ‘free food’ delivered daily from her Nonna Mary was a decided advantage and a welcome opportunity!
Her challenges and opportunities for 2022 were to catch up with her lessons and to look forward to her family holiday, which had been postponed four times already.
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She invited us all to voice our thoughts. We heard about each person’s worries, hopes and disappointments, and laughed about the opportunities we were determined to grasp and the resolutions we had no intentions of keeping!
Life will gradually open again. We will inexorably move towards the end of this crisis.
Routines will return, holidays resume, new opportunities and adventures present themselves.
But let’s also be mindful of the youngsters. Make sure we keep the conversations open.
If they can voice their thoughts, we can all help them manage their concerns and ambitions, and make sure they are equipped and supported to grasp their futures.
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