Diary of a mothering worker. January 5, 2022.

Post 448.

SCHOOLS, which restarted on Monday, are the big story in parents’ lives this week. 

For children online, it can still be challenging to stay focused, and avoid chatting in a separate zoom or Google chat, or the temptation of video games. Some parents are not able or prepared to provide sufficient oversight. Maybe they are grieving from a covid19 death or depressed from job loss. It was also always a mystery how people were expected to go back to work while their children are home, or expected to both work well and parent well simultaneously.

So we can expect that there are those children with continuing periods of unsupervised internet access who are searching for pornography, answering questions they have about sex, and posting images of themselves inappropriate for adolescents. 

Teenagers are on their devices and phones all the time, whether gaming, messaging, surfing or watching videos. The algorithms are an adolescent dopamine addiction we’ve normalised after all this isolation. We can expect that many lost out on extracurricular activities, including physical exercise, and that’s reinforced screen dependence at a crucial time in social, communication, emotional and brain development. 

Some are still attending school from their beds, rather than a desk, or don’t have a proper quiet space to work, and are probably checking social media throughout classes, particularly when their cameras are not expected to be on. For tens of thousands of others, who are not consistently online or don’t have devices, there’s the well-documented and class-divisive effects on their school marks and future income. Will a nation of adults just accept that they will get left behind?

For those who have returned to school already, or just this week, did the Ministry of Education gather pre-opening data to understand how schools should respond to their surreal range of home realities and needs? 

If we don’t ask these questions and don’t have an education response beyond back-to-academics, to what extent will the return to physical school be a stereotypical example of what and who is lost by business as usual? When it comes to schools, it’s key to think about the profile of the learner whom we picture either having returned to school or about to return in the next months. Is it the one who can best or least cope? What does transitioning such vulnerable students require?

Is this a student with family members killed by the pandemic? Is it one more vulnerable to witnessing or experiencing family conflict or household instability? We know that domestic violence reports rose in 2020 and remained high through 2021. Should students be told that these are expected issues and they can turn to teachers or guidance counsellors? Is initiating these conversations part of pandemic ministry policy? 

Increased rates of grief, anxiety and depression among children are being reported by local psychologists. In the US, schools saw this in crying and disruptive behaviour, increased violence and bullying, and sadness and fear. We are better at paying attention to poverty and hunger, but our education system is poor at social-emotional skill-building, which is why our society is so poor at it as well. US schools also experienced a “river of referrals” for mental health services.

Globally, educators suggest making time to listen to students’ concerns, offering opportunities to reconnect one-to-one with educators. Before opening books and preparing for tests, recognise that some may have difficulty concentrating or returning to routine. That’s normal. Buffing or embarrassment won’t help. Maybe this student was being neglected or sexually abused at home. 

Rather than just lecturing about covid19 protocols, also respond to fears and grief, providing age-appropriate tips for recognising and reducing trauma and anxiety. Reports are that children recover from the isolation better when schools take time to create connection, empathy and community. Finally, provide opportunities for playfulness and fun physical activity, which help students cope with life and stress, enabling them to actually learn. 

Schools are the critical access point to children. The pandemic may have affected their attention, decision-making, how they learn and how they relate to others. It would have been great to see the ministry present a “return to school” social-emotional learning plan, explained with a proper communication strategy, and putting teachers and parents on the same page. Remember, the pandemic is not over and the world feels like a bizarre war zone where anyone could unintentionally kill anyone else in days or weeks. The school transition should recognise children as survivors of an unprecedented disaster who learn best when first guided to emotional well-being.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 8, 2021.

Post 433.

The pandemic has made mental health concerns go mainstream. That’s powerful news for activists who have been labouring for decades to destigmatise challenges with anxiety and depression.

Whether because we are a heightened health risk to each other or job loss or isolation or additional care responsibility or generalised increase in stress, a lot of people are simply not functioning as they might have been before, often with only a vague sense of why.

The new academic year started this week on campus and I’ve had to revise my expectations, noting how many more students seemed unable to cope, complete or excel last year, some simply because they had to move back home with their parents, others because whatever they were managing to survive before is now too much.

Scientists even talk about our children and the bleak future they face, for the first time in generations, because of the climate catastrophe we continue to cause. It feels like we are in wartime, but have to act normal. Can we blame those who can’t?

In our house, we have turned to exercise like a miracle cure, taking walks or bike rides as much as we can.

It was really hard when outdoor exercise was prohibited. My ten-year-old falls apart when stuck indoors without sufficient physical activity. Her behaviour, mood and co-operativeness change, and I’ve come to realise how much children mired at home, on their devices, and without an outlet for their emotional energy are quietly crumbling even if neither they nor their parents realise.

What’s interesting is how we are all supposed to return to school, and a set subject timetable, as if extra attention to emotional wellness isn’t as necessary as the content students must cover. Our approach to schooling simply hasn’t caught up yet with a curriculum that includes mental wellness.

It barely nods to how children learn through play or multiple learning styles or the harm of high-stake exams or the reality of neuro-diverse capacities, often understood as autism spectrum disorders, but actually just the different ways that brains naturally work. When children return to school, will the Ministry of Education and TTUTA understand the times we are in and acknowledge that children’s and adolescents’ emotional context isn’t as it was in 2019?

Again, sports has provided the teaching examples we have drawn on over the pandemic. Here, tennis superstar Naomi Osaka has changed the game.

The highest paid in the world by 22, Osaka’s struggle with mental health, motivation and emotions has been heavily publicized, with her describing feeling vulnerable, anxious and depressed for the past three years.

When formidable athletes are using these words, it makes us acknowledge that these are not feelings only associated with failure, but even the most successful among us. And, beyond being successful is feeling well and being healthy.

The brilliant gold Olympic medallist, Simone Biles, whose skill has surpassed even the rules of gymnastics, similarly pulled out of events to focus on her mental health and physical safety.

In support, dozens of others – swimmers, weight lifters, sprinters, basketball players and other gymnasts – are speaking out about depression, ADHD, being bipolar, insomnia, contemplating suicide and seeking therapy. In this, another generation and the young women who are its best examples of athletic determination and sacrifice are leading the way.

These brave women are the models for my ten-year-old who I hope can help create a more compassionate world for herself and others. She should know that the journey to emotional wellness and mental health is not one you walk in secret, alone or ashamed.

Can you imagine if that was the message we gave to adolescents with the same emphasis that we put on exams?

Audiences haven’t entirely caught up with these changes, and Osaka and others have faced significant social media bullying for not performing as expected or, better put, for meeting others’ expectations.

Their replacements are heralded before they even leave the mat, pool or the court. That’s an important lesson too. Public accolades are fleeting and unforgiving, and they don’t set the gold standard for balance, good health, emotional connection and self-care.

I’m also thinking about my young UWI students. They must learn to work through difficulties, complete goals, do well and look after themselves.

And also ask for help. Perhaps, this is a shift that the pandemic is encouraging us all to finally make.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 14, 2021.

Post 415.

SCHOOL started back this week. I watched Ziya on her first day, following the teacher on her computer, thinking her energy seemed like she had already had enough. I couldn’t blame her. It’s a pandemic and she’s been isolated at home, doing school by herself in our living room for 13 months. Her energy felt like it could start strong, but would surely run down. Looking on, I thought I need a strategy to get her through the next two and a half months of homework, assessments and scaling up of preparation for SEA next year. 

Her marks dropped last term, but so did her class average, and I wondered how to respond. Does quarrelling work? Does that actually motivate? Is there even a magic formula? Is it about more lessons? We went for the long talk about working hard to be proud of yourself, and developing good habits to do well. She’d been through a lot of changes in her family, and had gone through various stages of managing, and it would only be normal for everything to which she had to adapt to have had some impact. 

She was doing everything she should for school, but seemed disconnected from it, like she was attentive, but on automatic while there. Perhaps, not learning among other children left her less motivated. Perhaps it has been harder to separate her school-self from herself at home. I have adult students saying how much harder it is to study without UWI’s library to go to. I’m tired teaching students over a computer and I imagine her just as tired of learning from a screen all day. Perhaps, she is just ten and these are unusual circumstances and this is her best. 

As parents, we are all negotiating the balance between our children’s emotional and mental health, their individual strengths and challenges, and the demand to step up to what school exams still require. I’m thinking about the students writing SEA in two weeks, and the stress even their parents must be feeling. How much to push in a pandemic, and with what costs to our children? I’m thinking about how I’m functioning less well, without quite knowing why. I also think my university students are barely keeping up. 

Studies conducted over 2020 around the world suggest that the home confinement of children is associated with uncertainty, depression and anxiety resulting from disruption in their education, physical activities and opportunities for socialisation. Children are more bored and less engaged. We may miss the signs of covid19’s impact on them. In a Save the Children study of 1,127 students in Latin America and the Caribbean (Dominican Republic and El Salvador), four out of ten children indicated that they needed counselling.

Alternatively, I’ve also seen children Ziya’s age spend vastly more time on their devices, playing games for hours and unable to socialise without them. Now that children are on their computers, phones or tablets, with internet access, they are also on various apps much more, all of which are designed to keep them watching, checking, scrolling or playing. 

These devices have likely helped them to cope, but I think they are also rewiring their brains. This generation is the youngest to have such access ever in the world and, as the Social Dilemma on Netflix shows, there are costs. We cut Roblox after Zi wanted to spend time just to keep up with the children who were playing more hours than her, and socialising there as well. The less she played, the less she seemed to have in common, and all that required adjustment too. We purposely got her outside as much as possible, and off her screen, so that the cumulative impact of being in front a device all day could be reduced. 

A year ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, I proposed in this column that maybe we should opt out of trying to achieve as normal, recognising that children may be holding it together just as we are, but may just be going through the motions, connecting in and out, as it feels that my own students at university are similarly doing. I want to be sensitive to what is happening even as I want both my students and Zi to learn. I’m looking at her on the first day of school, and wondering about the best approach to both her marks and her mental health as well as her school motivation and social relationships over the rest of the term.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 30, 2020.

Post 404.

I keep wanting to write about joy, to ask people what gives them joy, and to remind us that joy is needed as much as food and shelter. I imagine each of us finds kernels of joy that give our days meaning, connection and purpose, and I’ve been wondering what those are. There’s something missing in our analysis if we don’t observe and value those kernels for the way that we draw on them to endure aches, self-esteem challenges, scarcity or depression, particularly in these difficult times.

For myself, over this year, when so many have struggled with money, lockdown, injustice, and covid19’s stress on relationships or our own mental health, I’ve learned to pay more attention to my partner’s desires for joy, understand them as a priority, and more fully recognise joy as the substance of our goodwill, care and co-operation.

She’s lovely and beautiful, but I can get lost in my own world, and I’ve had to do a lot of learning about not taking joy and its necessity for granted. I’ve begun to notice those moments more, and to try to create them, observing that we can withstand so much, but not if joy is missing.

It takes mindfulness to consciously attend to what makes us or those we care for feel good. It takes effort to look at negative possibilities and to find or make small lights of joy, like a candle’s warm flicker in the dark or like the deyas we light daily to give small fire to our intentions as we navigate frustrating or unfulfilling realities. Amidst the troubles of our CO2-laden world, joy is like oxygen, like ocean breeze, like the songs of frogs on cool nights when you are sitting quietly and feel safe.

Attending to joy isn’t the same as being solution-focused because we are nowhere near achieving the solutions we need in the world nor even within our imperfect selves. It is more about what enables us to find life worthwhile along the way there. It’s not about escapism or simply being positive either. Rather it’s about how we negotiate sadness and happiness, and what we balance on the scales each day.

In one of many conversations over the last months, my long-time comrade and fellow columnist Colin Robinson mentioned wanting to choose to spend his remaining time in ways that brought him joy, laughter and togetherness. I listened carefully. Indeed, the work of trying to create a better world is meaningful, even if overwhelming, but joy is a different kind of momentous triviality; hardly an achievement and, yet, incomparably rewarding.

I find joy that enables me to feel my heart beating in the smallest of experiences, such as putting Zi to bed at night or having opportunities to tell her I am proud of her, now that we are home together all day.

In the midst of humdrum shopping, we would often catch her or her friends dancing (without consciously realising) to the music playing in stores. One explained that it’s because dancing (apparently wherever there is music) brings children joy. More power to them, just watching filled my heart.

I’m yearning to have different conversations than I usually do, to ask migrant women what are the joys we can amplify, to ask women who became unemployed over covid19 and who I know are struggling what are the joys that we can help ensure, to ask all those with difficult stories what are the joys that we can instead emphasise.

I’m trying to move from problems and their analysis, and from what needs to be transformed to instead delve into what gives us hope, brings happiness, and can be powerfully drawn on. I’m not coming with recommendations or neat conclusions. Instead, I’d like to listen, sharing in gratitude, and learning from what I hear.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 30, 2020.

Post 393.

Thinking about the economy as it falls apart, like chunks of glaciers breaking off and melting away, I’m wondering where to turn for the socio-economic forecasting absolutely critical at this time.

Not only have government revenues plummeted, but businesses – from factories to the small, independent cobbler in Trincity Mall – are facing reduced revenues, cutbacks and possible closures. Some will not recover after their losses or the impact to their lives. The words of a Flavorite Food Ltd worker speaks for so many:

“Families were broken up. Employees were evicted. Some are owing bank loans and they cannot pay. Most of us signed up for salary relief but didn’t get it as yet. I am a single parent with a mortgage to pay…My daughter was even accepted into the University of the West Indies, but we had to decline the offer because we don’t have the money to pay the tuition.”

We may be buoyed by deficit-financing over the Government’s term, but stories of hardship will rise around us for at least the next two years. What is our plan? By plan I don’t mean the Recovery Report, I mean anticipating the social impacts and rearranging state strategies to tackle the demographics and outcomes of such increased insecurity. Has anyone done a forecast of the likely socio-economic scenario in two years, and can we begin to work backward knowing the specific and increased vulnerabilities to plan for from now?

I began searching around for such forecasting after last week’s column where I wondered whether health officials had anticipated a rise in child abuse, as a result of school closures, pandemic stress and continued economic contraction.

If we know reports rise in October, but that teachers were no longer the point of direct access to abused children and a source of reports made for their protection, was there any strategy we should have mobilised once the decision was made to close schools? Such forecasting could have led to a national communication strategy to highlight this risk (for example, through the Ministry of Health updates), and increased and strategic use of nurses at health centres and even community police to fill a gap in recognising victims.

We can say the same thing about education. Where schools have stayed open in some countries, teachers have been absent in critical numbers because of the delays in getting covid19 test results. Yesterday’s UK newspaper, the Guardian, ran a story on some schools increasing their class sizes to up to 60 pupils as teachers in as many as 45 per cent of schools self-isolated while waiting for test results. Timely test results remain a challenge here so if we open schools in January or September 2021, can we forecast similar staff absences? Seeing these examples ahead of time, what should be our plan?

National budgets are prepared on the basis of requests from ministries and stakeholder lobbying, but to what extent are they a response to labour data, and an understanding of where women will likely be in two years as they currently occupy the lowest level tiers of income, are fewer small-business employers, are more likely to lose their jobs in service and retail sectors, and will have their capacity to work more greatly impacted by care responsibilities. Is our fiscal policy forecasting which labour market and gender inequalities will increase and aiming to tackle these in its approach to economic stimulus and diversification?

The Survey of Living Conditions, which provides measures of poverty, provides a picture from 2005, though that data suggested that Sangre Grande, Princes Town, Siparia, Mayaro/Rio Claro and Point Fortin, in that order, were the municipalities with the highest number of poor people. A 2020 survey is on hold because of covid19. A National Poverty Reduction Strategy was also to have been completed by the end of the year, and I would welcome seeing how it intersects increased poverty with increased family violence, educational disparities, and exacerbated vulnerability of children.

The National Social Mitigation Plan 2017-2022, developed to respond to the economic downturn prior to covid19, described the following: fall in real GDP, increase in debt, increased unemployment for youth, gender disparities in the labour market, increased retrenchment, fewer job vacancies, increase in depression, suicide and substance use, increased family conflict, increased criminal motivation.

Just thinking aloud today, is it possible to do some intelligent and collective forecasting and build a response in relation to what we can anticipate? Otherwise, it feels like we wait to reach before wondering what we should do.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. March 31, 2020.

Post 369.

Forgiveness is a beautiful and powerful act of showing the capacity and strength to free oneself from an old hurt. This must be why Archbishop Jason Gordon was quoted as recommending forgiving your family “because the house is too small to hold unforgiveness on top of everything else”.

As many come to terms with being locked indoors with people who have hurt us in the past or may still in the future, figuring out how to survive psychologically requires emotional power, flexibility and insight – and good advice.

We could be home with sexually abusive adults or with homophobic parents. We could be home with partners quick to insult and anger or with cousins prone to lack of consideration. We could have been on the verge of divorce, but are now in each other’s face with our hate daily. We could be holding on to the date when we are all released to the outdoors by the state, but also living with uncertainty about the risks that then increase.

Now that we are in a prolonged period of psychological stress, perhaps from the sheer unfamiliarity of this time or from our disconnection with those closest to us or from depression that has fewer distractions, many may not know how best to cope.

Given the vast rates of everyday neglect, child sexual abuse and partner violence, affecting thousands of households and tens of thousands of lives, there’s a lot to forgive filling all the spaces in houses too small to hold unforgiveness.

Naïve pontification undermines deeply-held dreams of confronting harm and being heard such that the house includes trust and safety, sometimes for the first time in decades, and can expand beyond the meanness of hardened disappointment and cynicism

Our messaging, from pulpit to politician needs to be better. Forgiveness is an outcome, not a beginning. It is impossible where fear and hurt create the experience of both a desire for justice and its denial. It requires a process which can be painful and difficult, and simply espousing the value of forgiving can deepen self-blame among survivors for their inability to act normally and as if nothing ever occurred. Indeed, in complex ways, survivors often blame even themselves and forgiveness is a knotty process of disentangling from so much that creates fear, shame and silence in our relationships with ourselves as well as each other.

So, there’s an opportunity for pastoral care, psychologists and state press conferences. Be real with the population, recognising deep trauma that resides within the places where we are now confined. Respond with messages beyond updates on infection and calls for physical distancing, as crucial to life and death as an epidemiological approach may be.

Those daily press conferences can expand their communication with the nation and help many people who have never disclosed their abuse, who will now see their abuser daily, who are descending into dissonance about how to be themselves among those who don’t understand or accept them.

By guidance, I don’t mean a day of prayer nor do I mean telling people to forgive without also affirming their right to acknowledgement of harm, apology and consent to a new foundation for relationship.

It’s a good time to bring in our best psychologists – not pastors or priests or pundits or imams – to every press conference to provide focused coping strategies for individuals struggling in all these destructive households, in order to not assume some ideal (and fictive) loving and conflict-free nuclear family model as the target of COVID-19 emergency policy.

Now that we have been told to stay at home, families are caught in a public policy decision for which they may not have the guidance, process, tools, words or safety to cope. We need to be helped to do so for our old ways of walking away or not being at home until late or escaping to work or school or a bar or for exercise will no longer do.

All state press conferences should offer such coping strategies, assuming that homes are the very places where we may least want to be.

We shouldn’t start with the house being too small to hold unforgiveness. Forgiveness is a gift just as much as unforgiveness is a defence, and it takes communication, courage, love and truth to exchange them. As much as it is a beautiful ideal, we must now take seriously how to manage weeks, maybe months, in homes that have long had little room for so much of what we feel.