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A lot of kids are having trouble getting used to being in a physical school since many of them were doing distance learning during the covid pandemic. Some of them may still be doing that, as many parents have opted to keep their kids at home for the foreseeable future to protect them from health risks. For some kids, distance learning is all they know, since they started school during the pandemic.
We are now seeing a lot of kids having trouble adjusting to life back out in the schools. They may have difficulty socializing and communicating with other students. They might not be very willing to get close to others around them for fear of catching something. They may have trouble sitting still, focusing, or obeying their teachers. All of these issues make for learning challenges that parents all over the world are struggling to overcome.
Ways To Help Your Kids Adjust to Physical School
Ease Them Into It
If your child is used to doing school at home and seems to be having trouble adjusting to getting back into the physical classroom, you may want to initially limit how much time they spend with other students and in a physical classroom environment. Try sending them for an hour or two a day and see how they cope with that. If they do okay, you may be able to increase their time in the classroom to half a day before moving up to a full day and a full schedule. You may also want to try to limit their physical classroom attendance to just a couple of days a week.
A lot of schools are doing their best to accommodate students who are having difficulty getting back into the classroom, and they already have plans set up to allow students to do both physical and distance learning. If your school doesn’t have a program like that, then talk to your child’s teachers and see if they can accommodate a limited physical classroom schedule for now.
Reduce Stress Factors
For kids who are used to doing school at home on their own, it can feel overwhelming for them to move into the classroom environment. Being surrounded by teachers and other students, as well as all the sights, sounds, and smells can be a lot for them. To help them experience less stress and make the classroom transition easier, you can look for stress factors in their life and environment and eliminate or reduce those as much as possible.
This could mean limiting their homework or housework. Maybe you can talk to their teacher about giving them less homework for a period of time. You could try hiring a cleaning service to clean and do some of the house chores for them.
Another way to limit stress factors is to help your kids eat healthily and be very careful about what they watch and listen to, as they may accidentally expose themselves to stressful content that increases low blood pressure and makes their stress levels harder to control.
You could also limit stress factors by making sure your kids get time outside every day and get plenty of sleep each night. This helps keep their hormones in balance, ensures they’re getting adequate rest, and improves their overall health, all of that contribute to better stress levels.
Practice a Classroom Setting
If your kids are having trouble in the classroom and showing anxiety and discomfort there, you can try creating a classroom environment at home for them to practice in. They may not understand all the things that are expected of them in a classroom or how the classroom functions if they’ve been out of the physical classroom for a while. So, you can set up a mock classroom that can take them through their paces. This gives them a space to ask questions and perform routine tasks in a classroom environment without all the anxiety that comes from being in an actual classroom.
You can take the role of the teacher in your fake classroom and run through some of the activities that might happen in a typical school day. You can find out what might be upsetting your child and what they’re having trouble with and then do your best to make them more comfortable.
Talk to Your Child
It’s easy to assume what’s causing difficulty in the classroom. It’s also easy to be afraid of what might be intimidating or stressing your child. Instead of wondering what’s wrong, you can talk to your kid and ask them directly what aspects of the classroom are bothering them or making them feel stressed out. Spend as much time as you need trying to figure it out, because your child may not understand exactly what it is that’s bothering them from the start.
You may also want to take your child to a guidance counsellor or professional psychiatrist to see if they can figure out what’s causing stress in the classroom for your child and then work through those issues. Not every child will have the same problems when it comes to integrating back into the classroom, and even the same solutions might not work for each problem, so you’ll have to take your child on an individual basis and deal with their problem individually.
It’s important that you be patient with your kid and give them time to adjust. Even when it seems like they’re doing well in the classroom, they may relapse and start to have difficulty all of a sudden. That could be due to new stressful factors or could be for no apparent reason at all. Make sure you’re giving your child the support they need so that they can do well in school and not feel pressured, intimidated, or stressed unnecessarily.
Going back into the classroom after such a long time out of it can be difficult, and it’s a process that a lot of children and parents are going through right now. If your child is still having trouble, hopefully, some of these suggestions can help.
