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

Let's take care of ourselves. Psychoanalyst Agnès Bailly continues to enlighten us on the anxieties that can affect our children during this time and how to respond intelligently.

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

"I want to go to school!" yelled this little 5-year-old boy confined with his mother on the other end of the phone. "I'm going to crack, I'm already starting to crack!" he said, playing on the ambiguity of language. His mother in turn shouted: "I'm the one who's going to crack!"
Many children complain that they only do work at home and no longer even have time to play. In the absence of externality, the parental Other has become omnipresent. Children may reject what they feel is the increased "power" adults exert over them. And feeling especially angry at the person on whom they are very dependent can sometimes cause both children and parents to break down.

A mother asked her 8-year-old daughter on 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 is painful?”
– "You!" she blurted out shamefully. She had just heard herself say a point of intimate truth that she had probably never expressed in this way before, and what's more, in front of the camera.
More than ever, parents and siblings are likely to be the receptacle for a whole host of emotions that children can no longer express to the outside world. Even though we know that love and hate go hand in hand, how can we avoid taking this personally?

"Even my worst enemy, I would like to see her and cuddle her!" confided a teenager who was bored to death at home, cut off from the conflictual stories in the flesh with her classmates. Their video exchanges did not replace the physical presence that makes a relationship lively. "In any case, it will start again like before and it will go boom boom boom!" she told me, reassuring herself for the future. Because for her, conflict is life.
The more urges are confined, the more they seek to get out. And it would be better if they didn't wait until the lockdown was lifted to do so!

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