Introduction
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a therapist who specializes in child and adolescent matters. We discussed how adolescents deal with mental issues such as stress during and post the COVID-19 pandemic. The therapist shared the difficulties faced by these young minds when it comes to socialization and networking. The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly limited the ability to socialize among adolescents at a time when they need socialization. The imposition of lockdowns to contain the spread of the virus has caused significant body changes among adolescents. Most of them have become more insecure and sensitive about their bodies. Any remark about their appearance will spark a negative reaction of stress, anxiety, and even worse, depression.
Main body
The confinement and lack of socialization throughout the pandemic have killed how adolescents used to socialize. With lockdowns in place, it meant that adolescents and every person had to stay at home. They could only interact with their parents even if the least they wanted was to be around their parents. They had to watch screens for long and unhealthy hours as a way of passing time. The limited socialization of adolescents has caused them stress, depression, and disengagement. The therapist heeded that the adolescence stage is supposed to be a period when children identify what they like as they appreciate maturity and growth. Confining these little minds denied them the ability to express their body changes and emotions with their peers. Stress and depression become inevitable since they do not have a channel to vent their challenges and lack friends to connect and share with.
Currently, everyone who has been through the pandemic will attest to how difficult it is to reconnect with those we used to relate with. The slow resumption of normalcy has brought in a wave of excitement and hope to regain our social lives. Everyone wants to talk, meet, and connect with friends and family members. Everyone wants to talk in the open and live with no filters, photos and videos, calls, or texts. However, there is a sense of disconnect from some of the friends we made before the pandemic. Our interactions are disjointed and most friends have disengaged from public interactions. Working from home has limited the ability to meet and share experiences in working spaces. There are even fewer friends who are open to sharing what they went through during the pandemic. The reduced levels of interaction post-COVID-19 mean that most people still suffer in silence with stress and depression. If this is the case for adults, one is left to wonder how worse it can get for a precarious adolescent mind.
How to present ourselves back to the world is another component that has largely changed our social lives. Trying to regain footing in our social lives after being confined for three years is not a walk in the park. Meeting people has also been a huge source of stress especially if one has no idea what they will talk about. Questions such as how to share losses with people who have not been close to you for a long period become hard to answer. My therapist added that at times, people want to share how hard hit they were by the pandemic but are unable to. We no longer know who is empathetic enough to listen and we remain uncertain whether telling our friends such stories would amount to bothering them. The long period of confinement has completely taken away our socialization skills. It is as if we are learning this process for the first time. It gets worse for adolescents who at a time when they needed to learn how to interact, they were confined.
There are other social factors caused by the pandemic that have limited adolescents’ ability to freely interact. Lockdowns meant that everyone stayed indoors and very few got chances to play or exercise. As a result, they have significantly gained or lost weight. In a world that is keen on people’s weight, adolescents tend to become insecure about their gained or lost weight. Harsh comments such as “You have gained so much weight,” and “You look thin” have made adolescents shy away from interacting with others. What is more, some people would go ahead and make politically incorrect jokes about an individual’s body shape and weight. For most young ones and even adults, such comments are hard to stomach. The continuous and consistent exposure to abuse makes them vulnerable to depression and stress. With the current world valuing body weight and appearance, such adolescents feel like they do not belong and distance themselves. Adolescents are now haunted by thoughts of how others will perceive them. None of these children have been taught how to deal with losses, pain, rejection, and negative comments. The pandemic has forcefully made them skip an important social stage in life and equally forced them to adjust to a new world that requires the skills they missed.
The disjointed social interaction among adolescents can be explained by scientific theories. For instance, the social learning theory suggests that human beings learn how to socialize by learning from their surrounding environments (Chuang). During the pandemic, everyone was confined and there was little interaction with those around us. Teenagers only had access to their parents and other family members. As a result, they did not learn how to socialize with peers yet the outside world heavily demanded these skills soon after normalcy resumed. The mental health issues that current teenagers face can be attributed to the lack of socialization skills. It takes time to learn social skills and a three years socialization gap is detrimental to adolescents. Given that it is a stage in life where one starts to appreciate maturity, one must learn how to socialize and how to deal with mental health issues.
Conclusion
Leaning from the experience shared by the child and adolescent therapist, I picked a few life lessons to share with the world. The biggest lesson learned would be that social interactions affect our ability to cope with mental health issues. The pandemic has greatly distorted our social lives but has done nothing to help us gain what we have lost. Additionally, the pandemic has brought other side effects such as significant body changes. The modern world is ready to criticize and make incorrect jokes about our body appearances. Our inability to socialize and to understand how such conditions came to happen is what makes others joke about our bodies. Such harsh comments cause mental anguish, stress, and depression to a victim. It is therefore important to think twice before making body-shaming utterances. Being sensitive about those around us can help preserve their mental health and sanity. As I conclude, adolescents need to be exposed to socially interactive surroundings to enable them to learn how to make friends and how to share their emotions. If that is done, there will be a significant reduction in the number of adolescents going through mental health issues.
Work Cited
Chuang, Szufang. “The Applications of Constructivist Learning Theory and Social Learning Theory on Adult Continuous Development.” Performance Improvement, vol. 60, no. 3, Web.