‘Children worry about COVID-19 impacts’

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Selina Kuruleca. Picture: FILE

Children and adolescents are worried about the impact the COVID-19 pandemic will have in their families and on the homefront too.

This, according to psychotherapist Selina Kuruleca.

She said she had noted these types of responses from children when asked what the most pressing issues were for them.

Ms Kuruleca said she noted answers such as worrying about what they were going to eat, if mum/dad were going to get their jobs back, was COVID real, if there ever would be a cure and lives lost to the virus.

She said additionally, reproductive health needed to be addressed for adolescents.

She said globally, children and adolescents had been impacted by a number of stressors throughout the pandemic — including being isolated from friends, not attending school, boredom at home, taking on new roles (caregiving), fear of COVID-19, loss of loved ones and for some increased abuse and or violence at home during lockdown.

She also said she noticed when schools reopened in August 2020 that students were physically present but not mentally.

“There was presenteeism in the classroom with children, but they were not mentally present,” she said.

“The Ministry of Education Heritage and Arts will have the figures on how many kids actually returned to the classroom when schools reopened in August 2020, if memory serves it was between 75 to 95 per cent kids returning to classrooms.”

Ms Kuruleca contributed to the Health Ministry’s response to The Fiji Times on the UNICEF report “The State of the World’s Children 2021” as a psychologist and short-term consultant for the COVID-19 mental health response. Her observations were sourced from the report.

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