With the progressive ease of the containment measures it will become essential to help our children normalize a series of preventive behaviors, promoting the sense of responsibility and not the fear of getting sick
“Don’t get cold if not you get off,” don’t eat too many sweets that hurt you “.
In daily dialogue between parents and children, the hints of health, the risk of getting sick, what you need to do to stay healthy are more or less frequentdepending on what parents think of disease, health, risks.
There are quite evident differences between particularly anxious parents, worried about everything that could damage their child, and the most “unscrupulous” parents, linked to the ancient said “what does not kill fat”. In recent years, however, attentive parents seem to increase, with a certain percentage of “worried” and a significant percentage of “too worried”. But worried about what?
The perception of risk
There is a difference between what an adult considers risky for himself and what a parent considers risky for his child. The “protection of the puppy” can make very worried about things that we do not mind too much when it comes to ourselves.
But in general It is precisely the idea of ”risk” that is different from person to person, because it is linked to two very subjective elements: The things we absolutely want to avoid and what we are willing to do (or not to do) to prevent those things from happening.
If we wanted to avoid, to us and our children, any possible disease, we should adopt behaviors so extreme as to make life impossible, without however completely eliminating the probability of getting sick.
For this, in general, Each person ends unconsciously to focus on one of the possible risks – pollution, food and their origin, drugs, etc. – to try to keep “at least” everything related to that specific aspect. This “illusion of control” makes the inevitable percentage of uncertainty more tolerable on the future, and therefore on our health and our children, which is part of life.
With the Covid-19 epidemic everything changes; To begin with, because it is a risk that we face for the first time. Then, because it is a risk that we are exposed regardless of our will. And finally because the consequences of the disease are still unpredictable. All this increases enormously the feeling of uncertainty, and the need to understand what you have to do to defend yourself.
Prevention, that is?
Because the risks can be prevented, right? This is what doctors have always told us, is what we say to our children: all our “Don’t do this”, “Don’t do that”, “Attentive to …” are prevention interventions.
These warnings always contain a hint of the risk, a “if not”: if not fall, if not you come the stomach ache. Daily risks, which do not make so much fear.
The Covid-19 epidemic makes the “if not” extremely threatening: “Wash your hands well, if not …?”
A few days were enough to create a mental association between the word coronavirus and death, and the obsessive insistence of the media on the numbers of sick and deaths, continually repeated and updated, has strengthened this mental connection also for children. But is this the message we wanted to give to our children? Wash your hands well if not do you die?
The possibility that a similar message has passed, that the fear of risking death in children if you do not wash your hands, if you get out of the house, if you touch a handle, if someone approaches too much, it can make the small excessively frightened and slow down the resumption of their social life.
This is not what must happen: now that we will move on to a “phase two” and then to progressive stages of loosening the containment measures, It is important that parents manage to create a responsible, and non -terrified attitude in their children. And this, of course, requires that parents first develop this type of attitude.
Do, do not do and why
When the prevention messages have been entrusted only to the threat (“do not smoke if not you come to cancer”, “do not drink when you have to drive if not crashed”) their effectiveness was very low. What has been discovered is that to change their behaviors, people must feel motivated, and to be motivated, it is necessary to make sense of the behaviors that are asked for. In short, it is important to understand “why” to make a certain thing useful, and see the advantages. For example, if I don’t smoke my lungs work better, the blood circulates better, I breathe better and I tire less: they are things that I can understand, there are advantages, I can do it.
What were we asked to do during this pandemic? One of the problems was just the excessive diffusion of different indications of behavior, sometimes contradictory, and often not entirely logical or understandable. This may have confused and frightened both parents and children, and risks giving rise to two opposite attitudes: a progressive loss of attention to the necessary behaviors, or on the contrary an excess of precautions that can lead to seeing a danger of contagion everywhere.
The moment of responsibility
When the children will begin to be able to go out, and then attend school, It is essential that they know from what they are defending themselves: not from an impalpable and omnipresent monster but by a very small organism that can pass from one person to another, and It can be stopped with some simple measures, which we have learned in these weeks and that we will have to maintain carefully.
All that the parents repeated to children in this period becomes a precious tool of responsibility: to tell them that from now on it is up to each of us to defend ourselves and others, give a concrete sense to washing the hands and the safety distance, will also have positive effects for the future, To develop a consciousness of individual and collective health that is still lacking.
We are preparing a generation of patophobic?
The fear of many is that this experience can make children excessively worried about their health and parents, too attentive to symptoms and diseases. This is certainly possible, but we should see it as A response to an exceptional situation, which can be reduced and “normalized” with the help of parents.
It has become dramatically evident that nothing, not even the most advanced scientific knowledge, can completely eliminate the risk of illness from the life of the human being. But just an experience like the one we are going through can allow parents to develop, together with their children, A more “healthy” attitude towards health and diseases: We will remember that it is not always possible to avoid getting sick, but that it is important to keep the body in good health because this will defend itself better. That some precautions, which have become indispensable in this situation – In particular, the washing of the hands -, they will always be useful, because they are part of the care of oneself and others, to be kept and developed even in normal times.
In short, We will have to progressively focus on health promotion and on everything that favors it – behaviors, lifestyle, but also care of the environment that surrounds us – instead of the fear of diseases, seen as a continuous and distressing threat. It could be an important change in tomorrow’s health idea of adults.
