Our research team has recently completed a series of focus groups with young people, to find out more about how they’re coping with the changes to life in recent months.
We thought we would share some of those insights :
- Young people have found doing learning from home to be really tough! Teenagers reported feeling uncertain about the future, and found learning from home to be more isolating and challenging, especially for kids who didn’t have a lot of video interaction with their classmates and teachers and were instead expected to do the learning by themselves. They reported struggling to stay motivated, and being prone to distractions.
- Some young people reported feeling really low, unmotivated and frustrated, and those with underlying mental health issues like anxiety and depression found that these were getting worse.
- They have been really missing a lot of their usual coping mechanisms, like playing sport, and hanging out with friends, and are missing the independence that they used to have.
- Some young people report a lot of positives have also come out of this period – they’ve had more time to reflect about their life and what they want from it.
Our researchers also looked at what young people are wanting from their parents at this time, and this is what they found:
- Many young people feel unable to talk to their parents about study pressure, and would like to have less pressure put on them at this time
- Parents can encourage teen’s mental health by staying positive, encouraging self-care , off – screen activities and helping them to establish routine and stay motivated.
- Young people say that they are wanting more understanding, acknowledgement and empathy from their parents, especially with how hard online learning has been for some of them, and how tough it has been missing out on milestones that they’d been looking forward to like 18ths/ learning to drive.
We have a great collection of resources that can help parents support their kids through these challenging times, you can check them out here. We’d also love to hear about how you and your family have been coping !
