You see, I was on a recent walk with a close friend of mine and this topic came up. It’s because we noticed that our kids seemed to be tired all the time. I don’t know about you, but for me and my kids, tiredness means negativity has crept in. And this negativity has a name… 

It’s called COVID fatigue.

That’s the name that psychologists have coined for what a lot of us are feeling. And it’s that deep weariness arising from more than a year of life in a global pandemic.

Unfortunately, it’s hitting us in many ways. It’s especially true for our children. In our home, it’s been harder for us to stay positive compared to this time last year. This is understandable because COVID-19 seems to drag on.  In my home town of Melbourne, we’ve had 4 rounds of hard lockdown - curfews, remote learning for my 2 kids, working from home for me and my hubby, only being allowed out of the house for 1 hour per day etc…  It’s been a very long and painful journey for so many of us across the globe. But if you think about it, it’s ironic to feel so negative at this point.

Why?

The world is showing signs of moving forward.

Large-scale vaccination programs are happening all over the world. People are getting inoculated and can now freely move outside. Children are starting to go back to school. In some countries, they already have zero cases (but my heart goes to those countries who still have high rates). So, why is there still a drop in positivity? Maybe it's because we’re too tired to have the energy needed to get past the negativity. And if we can’t recover from that, how can we move forward? What can we do to help our children stay positive and energized?

Practice gratitude.

Part of positive psychology, which is the field I specialise in as a registered psychologist and a university researcher, is focusing on gratitude. It’s an essential cog of our ‘orienting system’ that can help us recover from loss and trauma - just like what the pandemic caused us. In fact, I recently published an article in the Journal of Positive Psychology with a team of global psychologists where we discussed the power of gratitude as one of the key ways to deal with COVID fatigue. Gratitude plays an important role in helping children cope with the stress that they are going through.

By teaching your children the value of gratitude, it can help them keep their focus on the positives around them. It can also help them maintain hope and remain as happy as possible despite what’s happening.

Gratitude gives us the energy we need to see past the negativity we’re feeling because of COVID fatigue.

(Professor Lea Waters)