Wares Ali Khan :
School-age is predicted to conceive socialization, form patterned behavior, and most importantly to be configured with trustworthy companionship of the same age groups. At this stage, emotional and intellectual wellbeing is significantly settled and even potently shuffled through the interactions of peer learners, candid amity, and mutual interactions between students and teachers. School is a very space where teenage school kids remain engaged with unleashing the fullest possible development for living morally, creatively, and of course productively in a constructive setting.
The accumulated learning loss is a huge issue during the ongoing pandemic. Our teenage kids have been waiting eagerly to come back to the classroom environment. A practical approach in the process of rendering and sharing knowledge between school-goers and teachers is sustained there through interactive and reciprocal modality. More importantly, here our kids are nourished intellectually and emotionally, a pivotal process that might be accomplished by no means.
As our beloved kids have been experiencing prolonged school closure, and this grim situation hasforcefully affected them. For the school learners, the outbreak of Covid-19 has shifted their daily schedule, working fixtures, fabricated them melancholy, and turned them addicted to screen as an alternative means to cope up with the lengthy leisure which has ultimately originated an acute screen dependency. On the contrary, many school-goers have lost the zeal in many, as this stagnant circumstance has conveyed impacts on molding them socio-psychologically and intellectually vulnerable.
Tension along with stress is gradually escalating among students and guardians, for the time being, as the outbreak of the pandemic destined a murky scenario in the country. Most of the school-goers are in their adolescent period, the crucial time for reshaping their physical and mental state. Now, they need to have ample opportunities for blooming properly. An uncultured, stunted, and an idle mind is a much greater destructive force. Hence, we need to think over the future of millions of school-goers to provide them with mental comfort and bring them back to their beloved rooms too. We can never afford the losses of our children’s emotional attachment and spontaneous development.
The pandemic has compelled the school-goer teen-kids to stay home for a long spell making restricted in the four-wall space. Because of the disruption in their routine, they are more prone to hazards bound up to their teenage sensation. At this time no monotonous and melancholy state should be spared for the school kids. They need to be away from all varieties of negative feelings, focus and stress. That is why, respective parents need to listen to their adolescent school kids with patience, give priority to their needs, and provide possible comfort and relief.
A comprehensive and stringent pattern of physical, behavioral, emotional, and mental changes may appear this time where our adolescent school kids experience several starring challenges. Although a significant number of adolescent learners in the country have been experiencing an acute crisis related to their mental health, yet this issue is underdiagnosed and undertreated. Working parents, on the whole, are not able to apportion quality time to their adolescent kids. This proximity gap and deprivation might turn up boomerangs in some contexts. There is an alarming rise in juvenile delinquency, child abuse, anti-social, misappropriate, and deviant behaviors.
Teenagers with an emotionally disturbed can also experience huge irritability, loneliness, isolation, frustration, or anger. Emotional disorders can intensely affect their growth, social inclusiveness, and socialization process. So, to promote mental well-being and to protect adolescents from adverse experiences, psycho-social counseling is imperative.
Respective parents should make feel the school kids like to be with them always, provide the right care and compassion simultaneously. Sustaining an open mode of communication with the adolescent kids in respect of their core needs will render them relief and feel them secured. So, parents ought to deal with their school kids with patience and have a keen look at the four-featured growth in a bid to improve their total well-being.
Like many other countries, our country might bear the brunt in many spheres of its socio-economic sectors in this dire circumstance. So, initiatives to raise awareness focusing on this prevalent drawback among guardians is a must. The government organizations along with teachers, NGOs in collaboration with local social workers and education promoters can work together in an integrated manner to address the problems of school children in a planned approach.
It is indeed a great challenge for policymakers to safeguard the learning and intellectual well-being of our school children. An empirical budgetary allocation might function to cut short the crisis of our teenage school kids. The authorities concerned should prepare a pragmatic response and recovery plan to address the need of learning kids. We hope the crises and complexities our teenage school kids have been enduring shall be eased shortly.
(Mr. Khan is an academic).
