Parents on the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic

For some, the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns may seem like a distant memory they would prefer not to revisit. But for parents and students, even though school has been back for more than a year, some effects linger. The educational, social and emotional effects are still not fully understood. Jonicia June Shelton is a mother, a therapist and an assistant principal at HB Lee Middle School in Portland. She joins us to share her experiences. And we want to know how the pandemic has affected you and your kids and changed the way you parent. During the noon hour, our number is 888-665-5TOL.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Three days ago, the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency and there are plenty of outward signs that the pandemic is over. Lockdowns are long behind us. Another year of in-person school is nearing an end, but there are many lingering effects of the pandemic, and few groups have been hit harder than children and their parents.

If you are a parent, how are you doing right now? How are your kids doing? Has the pandemic changed the way you parent? You can share your stories, your experiences right now. Our phone number is 1-888-665-5865. That’s 1-888-665-5-T-O-L[1] .

Joining me now is Jonicia Shelton, a child and family therapist and an assistant principal at HB Lee Middle School in the Reynolds School District in East Portland. Jonicia Shelton, welcome to the show.

Jonicia June Shelton: Thank you for having me.

Dave Miller: Thanks very much for joining us. I want to start with a voicemail because we asked folks over the last few weeks the same questions that I just put out to our live listeners: how the pandemic has affected their families and the way they parent. This is a listener who did not want to leave her name but told us that she is a single mom of a son in Portland.

Anonymous Voicemail: ‘I would say he started high school as a ‘TAG’ [Talented and Gifted] student, an introvert beginning to make a strong peer group and finding confidence in his academic strengths. The pandemic experience has laden him with complete apathy and a depressive outlook on school on the whole school experience. I can hope he graduates in a month with required credits and a staggeringly low attendance.

As a mom, I have struggled with supporting his coming of age and the freedom for right and wrong decisions therein, while attempting to belay the importance of education -- especially while it is free and he is young. I’m proud of him. He is kind. He’s kind to his teachers and me but he is not present. However, he has a job, he makes his bed, passes on a clean room. It is hard to rally against his sentiment of ‘Why go, if we are not doing anything in class?’ Compound that by seeing his own mom struggling to complete a Bachelor’s degree and the looming debt thereof.

I feel I have little to stand on as to entice interest in education where it seems the interest in his enrichment through the education experience is lacking. I feel that the pandemic has completely derailed the positive aspects that I saw happening with his high school experience.’

Miller: Jonicia Shelton, what stands out to you in that mother’s story?

Shelton: When she said her son’s not a present, that’s what I really heard. That’s strong because I think when you… with myself, working with kids for years... even when I was in high school, I was a part of a Self-Enhancement Incorporated [https://www.selfenhancement.org ] and I got a chance to work with kids. So that’s been something I’ve been doing for years and having the pandemic come and there’s so much uncertainty and putting the world in a state of shock, I can understand what she means by, ‘He’s not present.’ He’s here and he’s living but just not being mentally present because it’s hard. Day to day we didn’t know what the world was gonna be like. So that makes a lot of sense to the mom saying that her son wasn’t present and I can identify with that with my own children and just the students that I served for these last several years.

Miller: Where do you start then? And that’s why I wrote that down too as I was hearing that voicemail, ‘not present,’ as whether we’re talking about as a clinician or a principal or a parent yourself, which I guess I think of as kind of overlapping realm of interacting with kids. I’m not even sure you can separate them fully. But where do you start? When that’s one thing that you see most clearly – not being present.

Shelton: You know, I think it’s gonna take time for everybody to go back to quote unquote, ‘What the new normal is for them.’ I think we have to let go of that expectation that people are gonna go back to the way they were because we all lived in a state of shock. Everything is new and it was really scary. So not being able to go to school and be around your peers -- whether you were an introvert or extrovert was really challenging for kids. Even as an adult, not being able to see your loved ones and tap into that whole relational piece was really challenging.

So again, just thinking about what that mom said about not being present... I don’t know, I think her continuing to let him be familiar with things and letting him do ‘him.’ What I mean by that is, if he likes to go to work, let him go to work. If he has a certain friend, let him be with that friend. Because I think that’s where you have to start. You start wherever he is at, you meet the child where they are. I think trying to get him acclimated to new things might be overkill because it’s too much pressure.

Kids, even though I really do love this day and age because kids are very great at identifying what the issues are, like, ‘I’m depressed, I have anxiety,’ they love to use those words and that’s fine. I think a lot of them actually know what that means. So they tap into those feelings more now than they did when I was growing up. So just starting where her son is right now and following behind him, but always checking in, because kids ruminate a lot and a lot of things come into their head and it’s not always the reality. So just making sure mom continues to check in with him, make sure he feels safe as much as she can control and starting from there, is all she can do. Then continuing to watch him and just making sure that he is as present as can be for her. But yeah, that’s where you got to start, meet people where they’re at.

Miller: Jonicia, you mentioned your own family and being a mother, yourself. How old were your children when the pandemic hit in early 2020?

Shelton: 15? And one was 12? Because I know my daughter turned 16 during the pandemic. So, yes, 15 and 12.

Miller: What was the isolation like for your own family?

Shelton: So I was in the process of buying a home in the middle of the pandemic and my daughter was a freshman in high school and she only got to have, I think, half of her school year? So, of course, she was ready for that whole social piece. Both daughters are pretty social and it got taken away and my oldest was really sad about it. She’s a social butterfly.

For me, I just stayed in the house with them and played games, we ate dinner together, and we watched movies all the time. I think we slept a lot because that was part of being depressed about the way the world was looking and not understanding what was gonna happen next. But I could see, especially my youngest, she became an introvert. Which was really shocking to me because she was so social and a comedian and she was only in the sixth grade. So, she only got the beginning of the school year and then COVID hit. She just got so quiet and I had to bring her out to the store with me and help her engage with people again because she became kind of paranoid. Like, what’s gonna happen? Am I gonna get sick? And we hadn’t had COVID. But we had heard about everybody else, and watching the news and it just became really scary and really quiet in my house.

Miller: When you would take her to the store, the way you put that, it almost made me think that it was like a version of occupational therapy.

Shelton: It was!

Miller: ‘You have to come with me because you have to know what it’s like to engage with the world again.’

Shelton: Right. I did, we did Zoom meetings with our families. We did drive-bys. I made her go to Walmart with me and I was scared too cause I’m like, I don’t know what’s floating in the air and people, if they’re gonna cough for me on purpose and who is not gonna have a mask on. But I also knew that my daughter needed that sanity of seeing people and being around other people and knowing that I get that they’re saying a lot of things on TV. But we also know that they embellish a lot and I wanted her to see that there are people that can be safe and you can still engage with people in a healthy way. But it was really hard because she was the one that was like, ‘I don’t want to go to the store, I don’t wanna go here.’ We spent a lot of time at IKEA. [Laughing]

Miller: Oh, because you got the new house.You had to…

Shelton: It was kind of fun to shop. Yes. But there were a lot of times when she was like, ‘I’m not coming, I’m not coming.’ Oh man. And I still see it now and she’s a freshman in high school but she lost so much of her youth by being scared and in the middle of a pandemic.

Miller: We got this comment from TY on Instagram.

[Instagram Comment] ‘I spent a lot of time with my boy during the pandemic: kayaking, hiking, camping, dancing, singing, painting, exercising, writing, reading, communicating, reflecting and generally being together more hours of the day in a healthy way. I got to see him make sense of the world without blaming anyone. And it was beautiful.

Then he went back to school and the most I can get out of him now is ‘the day was good and there was a gun threat.’ I hate it and feel like there’s nothing I can do about it because I’m back to work. At least for a brief moment I knew what it was like to be human.

Now, I’m not sure what we are, except distant, once again. He is back to talking like a child and I quote unquote, “adult.” The ground between us is once again untraversable.’

Jonicia, I’m curious what you make of that?

Shelton: It’s sad!

Miller: People had a lot of time with their kids for worse and for better in some ways during the pandemic. This is a parent who misses that time together.

Shelton: I think the best thing that dad can do is start his own ritual with his child. There’s things that I picked up, like we had already eaten dinner together, but I make it a point that we need to eat together every day, because that’s something we’ve had to do during the pandemic and it was a big deal. We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner all together. So, now that they’re in school, it’s kind of hard to do – the breakfast and lunch – but dinner, we’re gonna meet up and we’re gonna all eat together. Even if I take you out to eat, we’re going to make sure we keep that going, and maybe dad has to find something that they loved during that time, and bring it back to this.

It is scary for kids, going back to school. Honestly, you don’t know what kids went through when they were home. Some kids were left with their perpetrator. Some kids were left with their abuser. They were left with so many different things and watching parents struggle financially and mentally because some parents were already going through some things. Now I have to deal with this in front of my children. So that young boy is probably exposed to all kinds of behaviors now and he’s like, ‘Man, this is foreign. I don’t wanna deal with this. I just want to go back to the way it was during the pandemic.’

But for other people, the pandemic was torturous. So going back to school made them feel a lot better.

Miller: Let’s hear some more voicemails starting now with Mickey in Portland.

Mickey [voicemail]: ‘When we locked down during the pandemic, we had a five-year-old in kindergarten and a newly three-year-old from preschool. We used to be the parents that monitored screen time on weekends only and that really went out the window. We introduced technology to our five year old with a Chromebook, way earlier than I otherwise would. Even now, they have a lot more access to screen time and computers than I anticipated. But it has really built their computer literacy skills and they’ve learned to connect with people on Facebook Messenger and Facetime calling, and learned to look up things, for themselves, for my child, who is now in third grade as a nine year old.’

Miller: And here’s another voicemail that mentions time online.

Randy [voicemail]: ‘Imagine being a 12 and then 13 year old boy at home school with no social interaction during an awfully awkward age. I realized that the online gaming my son was doing was actually a social outlet. You know, he’s playing with friends or making friends and,

‘Shoot them, go around back!’

‘No, dude!’

And so it made me more tolerant of that experience for him, as well... I feel like some of that awkward social interaction is delayed and it’s taking place now with things like sleepovers and having friends over for a day and it’s made me a little more empathetic. I think I’m a better listener and a little more patient with their development.’

Miller: Jonicia, so two different messages from parents there, but both getting at the ways in which the pandemic changed both the extent to which their kids were on computer screens, but also the way they thought about that time. Have you seen what maybe are permanent changes in terms of our relationships to screens?

Shelton: Well, I think with adults we’re burned out. [Laughter] I know I am… I’m not a big Zoom person or any of that, anymore. Someone asked me are you watching this show or this show? And I’m like, I really don’t care to watch anything anymore because I was so addicted to TV during the pandemic. Now it’s like I can watch a couple of shows but it’s just a trigger to a certain degree. It’s just bringing up the past of me having no choice but to sit and watch TV all day, every day because there was nothing else to do. I did read books and I did certain things like that but TV shows were what was in because it was kind of taking me away from my element and the reality of what we had going on.

I do see a big addiction to screens with kids because I think that that’s just something that they had to do and parents kind of were left to letting the screen be the parent to a certain degree, with some parents. That’s a good and a bad thing but screens can be looked at so differently now.

I know for me, I’m not big on jumping on Zoom or any of that because it just took a lot out of me. I mean, I bought special glasses cause my eyes were hurting so much staring at screens all the time.

Miller: Lacey on Instagram wrote,

[Instagram Comment] ‘Our public school is still using the laptops they received during the pandemic daily. Which is sad because they’re all together in one classroom and shouldn’t be in front of a screen. It has made me work harder on educating at home and not relying on the schools as much as I previously had. They completely stopped teaching things like spelling during the pandemic.’

Miller: Jonicia, am I right that you actually became an assistant principal just in the last couple of years?

Shelton: Last year. [Laughing]

Miller: Last year. It seems like, at a middle school - which we’ve talked about on this show and there’s been plenty of coverage of - the particular challenges that middle schoolers and middle schools in particular have been dealing with. What’s it been like to take on this job at this time?

Shelton: I think I’m blessed that I got to do this a year after kids went back to school. So last year, I was a therapist for Portland Public Schools and I would come in and do subbing (Substitute Teaching) and it was just like ‘what is going on?’ Kids just had so many extreme behaviors and were just very angry. Which made a lot of sense to me and there weren’t enough therapists for everybody. I think at that time, I had over 30 clients and that was just a lot for me.

So seeing the students last year, they were really struggling, their families were struggling. Kids just didn’t know a lot because they didn’t learn online because teachers were also tapped out and it was really hard and this was unfamiliar territory for them -- teaching online in this capacity.

Then fast forward to this year, when I became a principal, I feel like the behaviors are a lot calmer than they were last year. So kids are really, really getting the understanding of like, ‘I don’t have to have a mask on, I’m safe now,’ but I do agree with that parent that kids aren’t … you know, we use iPads and we use it for multiple things and I don’t know if that fear is still sitting there that we may be shut down again. So we need to keep these iPads going and keeping kids familiar with them. I don’t know the story behind that but I do feel like it’s gotten a lot better in schools because we’ve had a year of, ‘what do we do these kids and their behaviors’ and they’re escalated. Now kids are becoming more familiar with being back in the classroom and learning and engaging with those students in an appropriate manner.

Miller: That’s pretty hopeful that this transition, maybe that there is some kind of light at the end of that tunnel. Let’s listen to another voicemail This is Emily in Salem.

Emily [voicemail]: ‘I have five children, three of which were pretty much through the public school system by the time the pandemic came. But my fourth daughter was in high school and the difference that I really noticed that it made in me was that all of a sudden I was not really too worried about the fourth child’s academic success. I started to be more concerned about her happiness, her connection with others, her well-being, all the other things that make childhood wonderful because I just had to let the academics go and not worry. Because I knew that she wasn’t being given the same opportunities as the others and she just really, I’m gonna be frank, she probably wasn’t gonna be as bright and cover as much content and I just learned to be ok with that.’

Miller: Jonicia, I’m curious what kinds of priority changes have you seen in parents?

Shelton: I think a lot of parents, their priority has been their children. But I’ve seen a lot more parents prioritize the mental health of their kids. I think that parents got a chance to see kind of what a lot of teachers and staff have been working with. Because we are with the kids eight hours a day and that’s a long time and so parents got a chance to see, ‘My gosh, you really do do this?’ or, ‘Oh, you really do need help in this,’ or ‘Oh, you’re lacking in this area.’ So for me, I’ve seen an influx of parents really trying to get mental health services for their kids and I think that’s been great.

I think this year, more so, people are getting back into the academic room and trying to see tutors and how can I support kids. But as much as we all want to support our children, the parents need a lot of help too. They just, it was a struggle. A lot of people lost their jobs and families and people were sick. So they just needed to really readjust and reevaluate what their goals were in their own lives. I think right now, yeah, the biggest thing, the takeaway right now is that people are really caring about the academics. Last year, to me, it felt more like the mental health side of it.

Miller: We have time for one more voicemail. This is Anne Marie from McMinnville.

Anne Marie [voicemail]: ‘I would say absolutely, my parenting has changed and I think for the good, inspired by reasons that I wouldn’t have wished upon my daughter or my family. But I now parent in a way that is much more human in terms of greeting people, making eye contact, modeling that for her, explaining why we do that, and how and when. It feels like all of those things that we had taken for granted before we know now that they could disappear tomorrow and we could think it’s just for a couple of weeks and it could actually be for years. Really important years of development for who they are socially and who they are in terms of if they feel isolated or depressed or alone in the world. So I’m really cranking up the volume on the way I model and value human interaction -- in terms of how I parent her. I’m grateful for that.

Miller: Jonicia, we have about a minute left. Are there things that you want us to hold on to from the worst days of the pandemic?

Shelton: I don’t know … [Laughter] … that’s a hard question. I mean, with the one dad, I think holding on to the memories of what made him and his son bond is really good. It’s hard to tell people not to hold on to anything because it was such a learning experience for everybody and it shifted our thinking and how we moved in society after something...so…I don’t even know what word to use… ‘tragic,’ happened to all of us.

For me, I just take away all the bonding time with my daughters and getting to know more about them and how we built our house together, made it into a home during the pandemic. But then we all had those sad days and if that stays in the back of our brain, just that memory, what was good, but also what was bad. Just so we can learn from that and try not to mimic it. If any big thing like this ever happens again, which I really hope and pray it doesn’t, but if it does, I think a lot of us will be a little bit more prepared on how to respond and what to do. But I would try to hold on to those good memories of things because I know that there were some good times with a lot of people. That was the time we got to do drive-bys and see people when they graduated. That was a time we had families on during ‘play game night,’ via Zoom. So there was some highlights during that time, but it was a lot of hard times for a lot of people.

Miller: Jonicia Shelton, thank you very much for joining us today.

Shelton: Thank you.

Miller: Jonicia Shelton is a child and family therapist, an assistant principal at the HB Lee Middle School in the Reynolds School District in East Portland.

TOL: Wasn’t sure if you wanted to keep this in. I deleted the phone # reminders from the rest of the transcript.

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