Enough About Coronavirus

Why we should stop talking about this pandemic

By Chris Thurber

Early in the pandemic, mental-health professionals cautioned against overindulging in news. Keeping up-to-date is important, especially during a health crisis or an election year. However, hearing the number of statewide, national, and worldwide deaths from coronavirus repeated every 15 minutes on the radio, television, and internet is depressing. Whatever the political leanings or preferred medium, your favorite news outlets were probably designed to be accessed any time of day or night, for about 15 minutes. It’s fast-food news that you’re expected to eat on the run.

Photo: © Can Stock Photo / 4774344sean

Unless you pay for a subscription to a reputable newspaper or long-format magazine, you probably gorge on a steady diet of splashy headlines. No analysis. No discussion. If you choose to consume news in this fashion, you are likely to feel helpless. You’re hearing all the problems, warnings, and gloomy predictions without any solutions or sense of how to assist. It’s like standing on a dock alone on a moonless windy night, hearing a distressed swimmer repeatedly call for help. You can’t tell exactly where the sound is coming from. And even if you could, the one-ring buoy on the dock has a line that is so tangled it would be futile to toss.

Now, imagine that you’re not an adult, but a child or adolescent with a diminished sense of agency. Your influence over the world feels and is limited. Hearing grim forecasts about the world every day is disheartening. Add to that the cancellation of on-site camp for most kids, and you’ve got a mental-illness perfect storm. It’s no surprise that Arthur Evans, CEO of the American Psychological Association, testified on June 30, 2020 before the U.S. House of Representatives that the trauma of this pandemic was likely to accelerate children’s decade-long increase in anxiety, depression, substance-use disorder, and suicide.

Evans went on to testify: “As households experience significantly increased levels of stress, strengthening both family and school-based, behavioral-health services can work to identify unmet needs, prevent additional traumatic experiences, and build resilience in children and their families.” Camps, too, have an important role to play. Even though most camps do not provide behavioral-health services, they do provide a source of lasting joy, self-esteem, faith (religious or secular), and resilience.

Turn The Tables

To keep that wonderful momentum going, here are five strategies that work. Presented as method-goal combinations, these can be done by camps now, before summer 2021:

METHOD: Adjust your news consumption. Tip the scales away from sensationalism and toward facts and analysis. Instead of spending seven minutes, five times a day, hearing a repeat of apocalyptic headlines, save your mental health and get back 15 precious minutes by spending just 20 minutes reading one story of interest in a national newspaper or long-format magazine. Understand more about what is behind the headlines.

GOAL: Replace pessimism with a balanced and realistic appraisal of the current situation. Your altered mindset will rub off on staff members, campers, and their families.

METHOD: Contribute to the solution. Give to a food bank, help an elderly neighbor, assist a relative with a risk factor, or contribute in some other meaningful way to keep health and morale high during this pandemic. Until there is a vaccine and a well-articulated national strategy, the greatest and most gratifying contributions will be local.

GOAL: Replace helplessness with a gratifying sense of contributing to a positive outcome. Positive leadership-by-example gives a camp community a beacon.

Photo: © Can Stock Photo / dolgachov

METHOD: Correspond with campers. It’s once again time to share camp updates with new and returning kids (and their parents). You don’t need certainty about next summer to share updates on the physical plant, wildlife you have spotted, and program plans in the making. Without instilling false hope, give families something to which they can look forward. In addition, offer ways that both campers and parents can contribute to a successful 2021 summer. For some families, this might be a monetary donation; for others, it might be a donation of their time, hard work, or supplies.

GOAL: Replace vast uncertainty with a little certainty, levity, and an opportunity to contribute.

METHOD: Ask campers to share something that makes them proud. Quarantine has shrunk everyone’s supportive communities and sense of belonging, but you can rekindle some of those by providing a platform for campers to submit 60-second videos or written updates on family news, personal projects, service work, or even trivia. Keep the spirit of contribution and togetherness alive over the winter.

GOAL: Replace loneliness with enhanced social connections, in bite-sized portions.

METHOD: End perfunctory check-ins. During the first week of quarantine and virtual school, it made sense for teachers and other youth-development professionals to check in with kids at the start of a lesson, game, or virtual program. After that, the endless queries about “How is everyone doing?” or “Let’s take a few minutes to talk about COVID-19” were—according to all the kids I’ve spoken with—nauseating. As a meaningful alternative to superficial questioning, create a virtual support group for a camp community, clearly identified as such. Or, leave the deep, off-season conversations about psychological well-being up to parents and mental-health professionals.

GOAL: Replace kind but cursory care with exciting online options and/or meaningful support.

We are all making our way through the psychosocial maze that coronavirus created, so no one is to blame for doing the best with the information they have. Fortunately, we now have more information about helping young people cope with pandemic trauma. We know enough to stop making COVID-19 the dominant topic of conversation and to get busy rebuilding communities and contributing to kids’ development by doing what we do best: involving kids in wholesome activities. This winter, do what you can to instill hope, not fear.

Dr. Christopher Thurber is a thought leader in positive youth development. He has dedicated his professional life to promoting social and emotional adjustment for young people who are spending time away from home at boarding schools, summer camps, and hospitals. Most recently, he co-founded Prep4Camp and Prep4School to share homesickness-prevention techniques and academic success strategies with the world. Thurber has been invited to present keynotes and workshops on five continents and is an award-winning contributor to international conferences, magazines, radio shows, and television broadcasts. Learn more, download resources, and subscribe to fresh content by visiting DrChrisThurber.com