When it comes to kids and the Covid-19 outbreak, I have two major concerns related to how we help kids not only endure the current situation, but move forward in a healthy way.
My first concern is the impact that the stress of this outbreak will have on kids, and particularly on children who have already experienced another trauma in their young lives. We will deal with this topic in future articles here on Hope 4 Hurting Kids.
My second major concern is how we prepare kids for grief related to a pandemic. On a smaller scale, there are likely many kids who are currently experiencing grief related to the loss of their normal routine. More importantly, given the daily projections of deaths which may be experienced related to this outbreak, it is likely that there will be hundreds of thousands of kids who face the very real prospect of grieving the loss of someone they love either already or in the very near future.
For many kids, one of their first experiences of grief relates to the loss of grandparent. Given that Covid-19 appears to have a disproportionate impact on the elderly, many kids may face that task sooner than they would have otherwise. We live in a grief avoiding culture, but unfortunately, we will all be faced with grief in the coming weeks.