Coronavirus - nothing to be afraid of

In a sense, every one of us worldwide who has endured the COVID-19 plague has been victimized, primarily of course, those who lost their lives, those who contracted the disease but survived, sometimes with serious after effects, those who have had their livelihoods taken away from them, and all who will face the economic effects of the months of virtual shut down. 

In the last article I contributed to The Jerusalem Report I dealt with the appalling increase in domestic violence during the coronavirus lockdown, as well as the inadequacy of the response of the government to the general phenomenon.

Since I penned that article, five women have been murdered in Israel and at least two committed suicide as a result of the violence of their male partners during the seven weeks of enforced isolation. It has led to demonstrations by women all over the country aimed at causing those in authority to recognize domestic violence as a serious ongoing problem, and to finally take meaningful action to deal with it, so that a woman sharing a home with a man can do so without fear. But there is another group of victims who may never get over the period of the coronavirus lockdown, namely the children.

Childhood fears are recognized by therapists as contributing to psychological problems in some adults, and it is already being acknowledged that the pandemic has significantly added to the range of fears suffered by children. A psychologist at the Child Mind Institute in New York has reported that half her patients have experienced increased symptoms during the lockdown, among them the fear that parents will die, a common anxiety even in normal times. 

During the past months, such fears have been made legitimate by the daily announced statistics of those who have succumbed to the illness and those who have died from it. On top of that, children have constantly been made aware that their grandparents are particularly at risk. They have not been able to visit them, and their grandparents were not able to leave home.

WhatsApp, Skype, FaceTime and Zoom were merely temporary comforts.

Even if parents and grandparents survive, the sensitive child would still have to worry that their parents may lose their jobs and there would not be enough money to buy food and to pay the rent. 

At the beginning of the outbreak, the daily briefings were assuring the public that children were less likely to be infected than adults, with old people being the most vulnerable, particularly if they suffered from preexisting health conditions. Then it was announced that some children, even babies had been infected by the virus, possibly then causing young minds to fear for their own lives. 

A family doctor in England has gone on record that he is concerned that a whole generation of children would develop health anxiety. His own four-year-old had informed him that, “If we don’t wash our hands, we could die.”

Adding to the potential traumatizing of children has been their isolation from social contact with their friends due to the closure of schools and the resulting distance learning. So in addition to the fears which many of us carry over from childhood, comes a whole new range based on a period in a child’s life when everybody in his world was afraid of a mysterious virus that was attacking people everywhere. 

Some adults never shake off the fear of spiders or snakes, even of dogs, which afflicted them as children. Most adults however, recover from the other common childhood anxieties such as fear of the dark and of a stranger creeping into the house and hiding under the bed, the fright caused by clowns, another common aversion among children (hospital clowns take note), and definitely fear of toilets and bathrooms. The anxiety in older children of failure and rejection is probably the most common fear which follows the child into adulthood, maybe lasting a life time, unless a strategy is developed to deal with it.

Childhood fears are not infrequently passed down from adults, as is the case with the coronavirus. Children who are afraid of thunder and lightning are likely to quote a parent, usually the mother, who would pull down the blinds during a storm before shutting herself in the bathroom. 

I know of one very mature and accomplished man, the son of a mother who had been adopted, who, as a child could not rid himself of the fear that he himself had been adopted. And the fear that the man she called father was not her real father, based on having overheard a neighbor saying  she was the only one of her siblings who did not look like him, haunted the childhood of a former colleague.

Fear is clearly a natural emotion which afflicts most of us at one time or another. Its causes are numberless. Some change with age some with circumstances, but childhood seems to be a particularly vulnerable period and the era of the coronavirus has had an impact of its own. A psychologist working with children in England has described her observations of them at play. She has noted them using a whole new vocabulary, words like isolation, lockdown, pandemic and COVID as well as a new threat: “If you don’t watch out, I’ll corona you!”