LAUSR

Like many parents, Nikki Chapman worried about what the pandemic would mean for her teen daughter, who was just starting high school in the fall of 2020. Chapman was concerned not only as a mom but also as a former teacher and the leader of parent support groups in her hometown of Liverpool, England. As COVID-19 swept across Italy and surged toward the UK in spring 2020, parents in Chapman’s support group, which focuses on kids with mental health challenges, wrung their hands. Schools and workplaces were closing and dire headlines warned that children and teens, isolated from their friends and classrooms, would experience horrendous mental health consequences. What if their children, already struggling in school, fell irreparably far behind? What if they slipped deeper into crisis during isolation? The support group went digital. Chapman braced for a storm of panicked Zoom calls. Yet, as lockdown set in, the calls didn’t come. “Well, maybe people are just finding their feet,” she remembers thinking. When days turned to weeks, Chapman and other group leaders began checking on parents. “The feedback we kept getting,” Chapman says, “is, ‘Actually my kids are doing better at the moment, now that they don’t have to go to school.’” Their most anxious kids were suddenly happier and more academically driven than before. Chapman contacted dozens of similar parent support groups across the UK. “The experiences we were having in Liverpool were the same across the country,” Some did better, some did worse, some did much worse—recent research shows that children and teens ran the gamut in their responses to the pandemic, with personality traits and social isolation implicated in the varied responses. Image credit: Hananeko_Studio/ Shutterstock.