Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1496720
14 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 9 APRIL 2023 NEWS MATTHEW VELLA IT was the great year of disruption, change and adaptation. COV- ID-19 brought home a new, mys- terious unknown in people's lives – illness and death, lockdowns and economic shocks, and a long- term bid to recover from the shut- down of trusted supply chains and office work. Today, a hybrid world of online home-work and remote exchanges survives, a legacy of a global pandemic made only pos- sible by the power of the internet. But two years later, those whose lives were upended by this great disruption are starting to recon- cile the toll of personal change. Children whose primary school years were shut down and forced to converse online with a teacher in a cacophonous Teams meeting, will suffer the most from losing a formative year of schooling; like- wise, their teachers have had to adapt themselves to cumbersome ways of teaching and assessing. And now, new research shows that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic greatly affected parents as well. At least one in five parents – 20.6% – experienced mental health issues because of the new demands and changes in their children's schooling arrange- ments and their own work reali- ties in 2021. While in 2020, only 6.2% of the parents reported that they were able to make time for themselves to rest, in 2021 this increased to 37.5%, perhaps reflecting the need of parents to destress from feeling overwhelmed and stressed with work, helping their children to follow online learning and family. These are the findings from the COVID-19 and Education Malta (Cov-EM) research project, car- ried out by the Early Childhood and Primary Education (ECPE) Research Group within the Fac- ulty of Education, University of Malta, where a group of female academics sought to document and explore what can be learned from the insights of different stakeholders in Early and Primary Education during the COVID-19 pandemic in Malta. "COVID-19 laid bare some of the difficulties that families face on a daily basis in their attempt to juggle personal, family and work-related tasks at once. With the private sphere of the family seriously challenged by the gen- eral expectation that families are permanently connected, the au- thors of this study threw further light on the impact of diminishing private space and time on the fam- ilies' mental wellbeing," said Prof. Carmel Borg, head of department in Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education at the Faculty of Education. "Of significance is the statistic that more than 50% of the par- ticipating parents felt 'stressed- out' and 'out-of-control'. This is a worrying datum, given that children's holistic development is heavily dependent on emotional- ly positive contexts. Internation- al research analysing the state of mental health of parents during the pandemic correlates parental stress and anxiety with an array of issues, ranging from children's psychological problems to harsh parenting." The report was carried out by Josephine Deguara, Charmaine Bonello, Rosienne Camilleri, Jose- phine Milton, and Tania Muscat, all lecturers in early childhood and primary education. With the gam- ut of experiences presented in five individual reports clearly showing the way children's education was upended by the removal of physi- cal learning, the findings however reveal a general shift in sentiment from the pandemic year of 2020 to that of 2021, when a full 12 months of partial lockdowns and restrictions had been clocked. Long-term disruption Crucially, the drastic changes in two surveys over the 2020 and 2021 experiences indicate that while disruption in the pandem- ic year was met unquestioningly, that sentiment changed a year later when vaccinations started being made available with a slow return to normality. For example, in September 2020 (Survey 1) 68% of parents felt confident supporting their children with online technology, even when they had to learn how to navigate online domains. But in a second survey in September 2021, this dropped considerably to 36.1%, suggesting that in the second lockdown, schools were using more varied online modes of online teaching than before. The radical change in sentiment is further attested to findings that 57.2% of parents in Survey 1 claimed that they found support from the school with respect to their child's learning, but then this decreased to just 2.1% in Survey 2, "reflecting the level of helplessness and abandonment parents repeat- edly highlighted in 2021." Parents learnt quickly about the many distractions at home in 2020 (58.7%) which were not helping their children to focus – video games, constant TV and YouTube screening are often complained-about culprits – but this decreased to 37.8% in 2021, possibly showing that some par- ents tried to address this issue. A positive finding was that most parents (66.4% in 2020 and then 78% in 2021) supported their chil- dren in online activities, and that even more (76.3% in Survey 1 and 84.5% in Survey 2) spent more time helping their children with their work and explaining con- cepts to their children. But on the negative side, 54.5% of the parents claimed that they 'felt stressed and out-of-control'; which increased to 69.8% 2021. "The reason for such an increase could be that parents were feeling tired and stressed with continu- ously supporting their children with online teaching and over a long time. At the time of the sec- ond survey, the novelty of online learning had worn out and keep- ing children engaged for long hours in front of a screen was hav- ing its toll on parents," the authors of the report said. A silver lining was that in 2020, 66.5% of the parents claimed their relationship with their children improved during COVID-19 as they spent more time together, when compared to their relation- ship prior to the pandemic. But it is worth mentioning that 12.7% of the parents reported that in the second school lockdown their re- lationship with their children got worse. "The thread of negative feelings was constant in Run 2," the authors continue. "While in Run 1 many parents (66.5%) man- aged to remain meaningfully con- nected to relatives and friends, in Run 2 this decreased considerably to 21.3%." And the level of happiness and satisfaction decreased from 2020 to 2021. While 34.6% of the par- ents maintained that they felt hap- pier and 37.1% felt more satisfied in Survey 1, these percentages decreased to 28.9% and 22.3% re- spectively in Survey 2. In fact, in Survey 2, 44.7% claimed that they felt much less happy and 41.2% less satisfied. Stressless mornings but longer days As a result of school lockdowns, the majority of parents (72.5%) valued the lack of stress in getting ready for school every morning, and 72.4% valued not having to think what to wear while 69.3% liked spending less time commut- ing to and from schools. Other parents (61.9%) appreciated not having to worry about going to work if their child was ill while COVID schools lockdown dealt parents mental health blow The effects of COVID-19 on children's early education are still being felt to this day. A group of academics believe their report sheds light on shortcomings within the Maltese education system