write an analytical paragraph on anxiety of parents and reopening of schools
Answers
Explanation:
The COVID-19 virus invasion and its impact on human behavior have been quick and unprecedented. It has abruptly produced a series of significant challenges and opportunities for those who study human behavior. In this article, we look at some special implications for understanding its impact on children and how we care for them. We also look specifically at one aspect of this situation: departure and separation protests in young children (although older children, adolescents, and parents themselves may also experience separation issues). We view separation anxiety from the perspective of behavioral developmental theory. Further, we make suggestions for how to deal with the young child’s protests after requirements for social distancing are over. Many parents are unsure about how to handle their children’s anxiety or fear as their children return to school or have to visit other environments outside their homes. Social distancing has caused families to develop strict home routines as they have been struggling with an unprecedented lockdown. For many parents and their children, this extended period of family confinement and severe restrictions has been especially stressful. But some families have adapted by creating constructive routines and learning environments for their children, maintaining a positive attitude, and trying to balance work at home with family time. Others have fallen into more problematic patterns of behavior, such as coercive interactions.
In this article, we stay focused on the separation situation and its effects on parents and young children by using the lens of behavioral development theory (Novak & Pelaez, 2004). Our treatment of separation protests is uniquely based on behavior-analytic research (Gewirtz & Pelaez-Nogueras, 1990, 1991, 1992). We conclude by offering specific suggestions about how to handle the separation difficulties that will inevitably emerge in some families upon returning to school.
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Families and Schools as Behavioral Systems
The COVID-19 crisis came on quickly in the US winter and in the spring of 2020, right in the middle of the school year. One of the immediate effects was the sudden disruption of the dynamic interactions among children and their care providers. In many communities, total social distancing was invoked with little warning. Existing relations with teachers and peers were completely shut down, and families were left to scramble to find new ways to care for and educate their children as a replacement.
Our behavioral systems theory (BST; Novak, 1996, 1998; Novak & Pelaez, 2004) incorporates developmental dynamic-systems concepts into behavior analysis. BST treats both schools and families as behavioral systems. In the case of schools, the ongoing reciprocal interactions among children and teachers and peers in the classroom develop into functioning systems that are highly efficient in producing reinforcers (both positive and negative). The same is true for the behavioral systems that children participate in at home with parents, grandparents, and siblings. These dynamic transactions take time to develop but become well attuned to the contingencies over time. A sudden and drastic change of conditions, as that which has occurred with the shutdown of schools in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, means these well-adapted behavioral systems are thrown into chaos. That means many previously reinforced behaviors are no longer reinforced, establishing operations are no longer in effect, and once available cues for guiding the child (and parents) are now missing. Consequently, the two systems have been disrupted quite decidedly.
One way to look at the impact on behavioral development is to look at the disruptions they produce in all four terms of the behavioral contingency chain. In most U.S. households, time spent in school or preschool is a significant part of a child’s everyday life. Typical patterns of interaction emerged in the hours the child spent transacting with teachers and fellow peers. Some of these interactions are primarily academic in nature, and nearly all of them involve social interactions. Likewise, parents spent a significant part of the day at work, where they develop social interactions with coworkers and perhaps the public. In both the school and work environmental systems, participants develop strongly reinforced patterns of interactions based on behavioral contingencies and social rules. The new social-distancing rules in this age of pandemic have eliminated some of these former contingencies and created fresh ones.