By Nisha Vinayak & Vandana GopikumarTen-year-old Abi is terrified of Covid. "If I test positive it would mean that I would have to be separated from all of those I love and be alone and ill," says Abi, who is part of a group of children whose mothers were formerly homeless women with mental health issues.
Ibrahim, a teenager, is struggling with
online schooling, postponing of his board exams and lack of structure to his day. "I know I can do a lot better, but I am drained out and don’t feel invested as much in my studies or future. I have lost the level of confidence and motivation I had the previous year," he says.
Abi and Ibrahim are not alone in their fears. With 158 million children, 117 from rural areas, there has still been little focus in the country about Covid-19 messaging for children. Parents, especially from
vulnerable communities, struggle with explaining a
pandemic they have little knowledge about, but has wrought such mayhem into their already difficult existence.
While much has been written about the impact of the pandemic on education, isolation and vaccinations, and with good reason, the time is ripe to consider the long-term ramifications including the issues of starvation, uncertainty, domestic violence and disrupted childhoods, especially among the ultra-vulnerable.
In this context, the ultra-vulnerable could be children with parental mental illness, those living with mental illnesses themselves, those prone to self-harm, children from impoverished communities including fishing slums, agrarian villages and Irula tribal communities where loss of livelihoods and exposure to scarcity is acute.
A majority of parents from these communities subsist on daily wages, leading to a hand to mouth existence leaving little in the way of savings. A survey by the Banyan during the early months of the pandemic saw more than a third of these families go down to zero income and about half with income losses between 50% and 100%. This has led to primary concerns in these households surrounding food, clean water and basic health care rather than acquiring a phone to follow online class. "We sometimes have to manage with rice, water with chilies," says a parent.
A family from the Irula community was forced to send their children to find work, with a 13-year old-girl becoming the sole breadwinner. Sowmiya, 18, daughter of a single mother, finds herself distracted from online class as she has to manage chores at home while her mother goes to work. Children belonging to these groups find themselves growing up fast. Being at home and constantly around their parents, they are faced with the realities of cash crunch, of having fewer meals than when they were at school, and of having to live in cramped
closed spaces with extended family. In such a situation, when parents are on edge, domestic violence has also been on the rise, with many children ending up as reluctant audience.
Having the children underfoot, with no fixed routine and bursting with pent up energy and boredom make them far more difficult to handle and parents, faced with multiple problems, find themselves beating the children much more than they used to. As one mother put it, ‘‘We can’t help it. In this one room house, stuck together all day, we no longer enjoy the children and they no longer enjoy our love and affection. Everything troubles me, from their lack of routine to their constant squabbling. For them to be happy and free, as children should be, school has to resume. But we are also afraid they will get infected and bring home the virus."
The trauma from the pandemic on these children, however small or large, is likely to stay with them for an extended period and may express itself in forms that we are yet unable to fully predict. There is, however, considerable evidence that adverse early childhood experiences leave a lasting impact on the development of the brain. Adult anxiety, depression, disorders of extreme stress and post-traumatic stress disorder may all have roots in the pre-adolescent period, especially when unaddressed immediately. This suggests the use of counselling and support, ideally from educational institutions in complementing academics.
Supportive messages with clear directions as to how and when to seek help, easy to access helplines and safe spaces for children to discuss their fears, feelings and needs would all be a positive step in this direction. Another key support system is a strong peer group and sharing these unplanned and often harrowing experiences. Having grown up around several women, all with multiple complex problems, children can emerge as young adults with a strong sense of justice, equality and an ingrained need to do something about the stigma that surrounds mental ill health in society.
The pandemic brought these youngsters aged between 10 and 22 years together, and they have come up with a plan to form a taskforce that provides support to other children with parents with mental illness, or who are suffering from problems themselves by giving them a safe space to speak up and encouraging them to seek professional help if necessary. The children at the Banyan decided the group would be called Roots, as the idea has been born out of their experiences. "We want to nurture those in need and help them have better childhoods," says Preethi, the eldest in the group. "We also have to deal with the idea of an unequal world; relative poverty hurts, especially in a technologically connected world, where we realise that social capital may influence life trajectories. But we will be the change and hope for the movement to snowball."
(Nisha Vinayak, a counselling psychologist, and Vandana Gopikumar, a social scientist, are from Banyan Academy ofLeadership in Mental Health)