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Pre-teens adjust to living during COVID-19 pandemic

Ogden Newspapers photo by Darby Hinkley From left, siblings Leo, 11, and Matea Torres, 15, sit at a picnic table at Starlite Beach in Alpena, Michigan. The pair talked about how the pandemic has affected them.

Being a kid or a teen has its ups and downs — and that’s even without having to endure a global pandemic.

Adjusting to not seeing friends for several months during the COVID-19 quarantine period has been hard for some young people, but others say it’s actually been a stress reliever. And as mandatory shutdown orders have gradually been lifted, some kids are getting out more and enjoying their summer so far.

Neil Boothby is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and director of the university’s Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child. The child psychology and development expert said children often mirror the behaviors and reactions of their parents and caregivers — meaning if the adults remain calm and rational amid the pandemic, so will their children.

“I’ve seen a lot of really creative ways in which parents have sort of used the time at home in a positive, advantageous way,” Boothby said. “I think the key really has been setting up routines, making sure that kids are/were part of distance learning programs.”

He noted that one’s understanding of the pandemic depends largely on where they live and how hard that area has been hit by the virus. Another factor that plays into a child’s psyche, he said, is the authorities’ response to the outbreak.

“I think, by and large in this country, how one is understanding the pandemic is as much locally determined as it is nationally determined,” Boothby said. “And, as you’ve seen across the country, there certainly has been an uneven response to the precautions that have been prescribed by the Centers for Disease Control, including social isolation, masks, washing your hands.

“Some communities have taken that very seriously, while others haven’t,” he continued. “So, in general, the response — the way that parents and others are talking to kids — is different.”

He added that young teens may be having the most difficulty if they are not able to see their friends during a formative stage of their life.

“I think it’s particularly hard for young adolescents and kids that are in high school,” Boothby said. “I think it has been very challenging because so much of one’s identity is attached to how you engage with your friends and the absence of those kinds of relationships can make it more difficult.”

Preteens and teens in Alpena, Mich., had some observations and mixed emotions about being isolated from their friends and dealing with the anxieties of avoiding exposure to the novel coronavirus.

“I don’t really feel like things are getting back to normal,” said Elizabeth King, 11, from inside her grandfather’s air-conditioned RV on a hot late-June day.

She and her family were enjoying the week at Campers Cove RV Park in Alpena. They are from the Fairview/Mio area.

“We still have to social distance and we weren’t able to be at school for the rest of the year,” she said. “I was really looking forward to that because we would have been able to see our pen pals and stuff like that.”

Despite the pandemic, she and her sister go to gymnastics sessions, and she said it’s disappointing because they only had four people present at the last session — and that included both her and her sister.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s sister, Teidra King, who is 9 years old, said she thinks things are getting “a little bit” back to normal.

“People are getting out more than they were,” said Teidra King. “And we are going to other places.”

At Starlite Beach in Alpena, siblings Matea, 15, and Leo Torres, 11, talked about how the pandemic has affected them, explaining that at first it was tough because they couldn’t see their friends. In recent weeks, however, that’s changed.

“Lately, I’ve been able to go to the beach and hang out with my friends more often,” Matea Torres said.

She said it was sad that she was unable to participate in track season this year, but she has been running on her own with the encouragement of her parents, Jerome and Lara Torres, who are both personal trainers at the Bay Athletic Club in Alpena.

Matea Torres participated in two online courses so she was able to continue those, which were already established online courses prior to the shutdown.

“I could keep up with that, but I didn’t really get to interact with anyone,” she said.

Matea Torres said her dance classes were switched to a Zoom format, so she was glad she was still able to participate in some way.

“That was cool that I got to continue doing dance,” she said.

She added that the pandemic has even led to her watching movies in a different light, considering social distancing and being hyper aware of germ exposure.

“It’s weird,” she said. “We watched a movie last night. There were these people and one of them was coughing, and he went to touch the other one. It was kind of like, ‘What the heck?'”

Her mom noted that everyone has adjusted and sort of accepted what she described as “the new normal.”

“At the beginning of the quarantine, when all this started, and it just felt so weird and crazy,” Lara Torres said, “It’s almost weird and crazier to me that it’s feeling more normal now.”

Because of his asthma, Leo Torres has not been able to go to indoor establishments yet, his mom Lara Torres said, but he has been enjoying meeting up with friends at the beach after being quarantined for months at home.

He said he didn’t really feel worried or afraid, but he was “just wondering when it would be over, and how protected we have to be.”

Still, he couldn’t deny how disappointed he was that his baseball season was canceled because of the pandemic.

“I was kind of sad because it was my third year playing it,” he said. “I don’t know if soccer is going to be up or not.”

He has been playing catch and learning new workouts with his dad during quarantine. During the shutdown, Leo Torres was able to communicate with his friends via phone and through interactive online video games. Because he is shy, communicating online is somewhat easier for him than it would be to have in-person interaction, he said.

Lilly Lozen, a self-proclaimed introvert, has actually been enjoying the isolation caused by the mandated shutdown. The 13-year-old is going into eighth grade at Thunder Bay Junior High in Alpena.

“I never really liked going places, especially shopping,” Lozen said. “I don’t really like doing that kind of stuff, so now at least I have an excuse to stay inside.”

She enjoys drawing and has been working on making some comics during quarantine.

“With school and going places, it’s kind of stressful,” Lozen said. “My anxiety gets all worked up.”

She has been keeping in touch with friends and making new friends using the online platform Discord, which allows you to create channels to communicate with like-minded people. She has been sharing her comic ideas with friends online.

“I joined a Discord server, and I made a nice little online friend group,” she said, noting that nine friends are in that group. “Even though we’ve only been talking to each other for a few months, it feels like we’re really close. It feels like we’ve known each other longer. We have this connection. It’s nice.”

Lozen didn’t mind doing schoolwork from home, even though the online classes were optional.

“At first, I thought it would be a few weeks or something, and everything would be fine and normal,” she explained, “but then it was like, ‘Nope. You’re not going back to school.’ So I was like, ‘Oh, OK. This is going to be a bit different than I thought.'”

She said that being home allowed her to step back from the drama of junior high.

“Besides talking to friends online, I’ve just kind of relaxed and I’ve been drawing and watching Netflix,” Lozen noted.

She’s been out for ice cream with family a few times, and she’s been swimming in her grandmother’s pool. As far as she’s concerned, social distancing is a comfortable way to live.

“It’s been pretty stress relieving,” she said.

Boothby, the child development expert, added that looking ahead is important to maintaining positivity in these uncertain times.

“I think we all need to be looking forward, in terms of, in the fall, schools reopening,” said Boothby, who lives in Connecticut, where cases have continued to decrease. “It seems that that’s a priority in most parts of the country. I think that, here, if the curve has flattened, so to speak, and schools reopen and reopen carefully, it can be a fairly smooth transition.”

He added that if governmental authorities could agree and enforce equal rules and policies across the country, we would be better able to keep cases going in the right direction.

“There isn’t any coherence nationally,” Boothby said. “And that’s not good for kids either.”

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