“It’s going to go boom boom boom again!”

Let's take care of ourselves. Agnès Bailly, psychoanalyst, continues to shed light on the anxieties that may affect our children during this period and how to respond to them intelligently.

Since the lockdown, kindergarten and primary school children who aren't connected to social media with their own smartphones are deprived of their classmates. As for their parents, outrageously transformed into teachers, they're everywhere. But where are the others?

"I want to go to school!" yelled the five-year-old boy on the other end of the phone, confined with his mother. "I'm going to crack, I'm already starting to crack!" he said, playing on the ambiguity of language. His mother chimed in, "I'm the one who's going to crack!"
Many children complain of doing nothing but schoolwork at home and no longer having time to play. In the absence of outside influences, the parental figure has become omnipresent. Children may reject what they perceive as an amplified "power" exerted by adults over them. And experiencing anger, especially towards the person on whom one is most dependent, can sometimes be a breaking point for both children and parents.

A mother asked her 8-year-old daughter in a video if it wasn't too hard not going to school.
"I don't know... I don't really like homeschooling... because it's a pain!" she replied, somewhat embarrassed.
– His mother insisted: “What’s so difficult?”
"You!" she blurted out shamefully. She had just heard herself express an intimate truth that she had probably never articulated in such a way, and what's more, in front of a camera.
More than ever, parents and siblings are likely to become the recipients of a whole host of emotions that children can no longer express externally. Even though we know that love and hate go hand in hand, how can we avoid taking this too personally?

“Even my worst enemy, I’d love to see her and hug her!” a bored teenager confided in me, stuck at home, cut off from the face-to-face conflicts with her classmates. Their video chats couldn’t replace the physical presence that makes a relationship come alive. “Anyway, it’ll all start up again like before, and it’ll be boom boom boom!” she told me, reassuring herself about the future. Because for her, conflict is life.
The more our impulses are confined, the more they seek to escape. And it would be best if they didn't wait for the end of lockdown to do so!

Agnès Bailly, psychoanalyst, 75010 Paris
Member of the School of the Freudian Cause