Resilience: this is a term that has come up often since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic. This term designates the ability to recover from an unforeseen event, to deal with daily changes thanks to its own psychological resources.
It is also the central theme of a study by the authors of the Weekly Epidemiological Bulletin (BEH), entitled Confeado. This study assesses the psychological health of children and adolescents facing the ordeal of the health crisis.
The survey was carried out among 5,327 young people aged 9 to 18, including 81 in the care of child protection, interviewed online between June 9 and September 14, 2020.
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The most affected categories
First conclusion: adolescents seem to be the most affected. They report difficulty falling asleep, nightmares or waking up more often, increased sadness or nervousness upon waking, overeating and feeling tired.
Girls reported encountering these difficulties more often than boys.
“Adolescents also had significantly lower resilience than younger ones,” add the BEH authors.
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Risk factors
They identified three main factors contributing to distress and resilience difficulties:
- Housing, that is to say confinement in a home in an urban area, without outdoor space or over-occupied (preventing isolation);
- Resources, namely financial and food difficulties, a decrease in income, a period of parental unemployment or the lack of internet access;
- The family, more specifically single-parent families, the absence of social support, parents with a level of education below or equal to the baccalaureate or born abroad.
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Children lacking activity
Children’s well-being has been affected by other factors, such as lack of physical activity, increased time using screens and social media, or “feeling overwhelmed with work. school “, note the authors of the BEH.
Often, children also feared seeing a loved one infected with Covid-19 and hospitalized.
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What solutions?
To preserve the psychological well-being of children and adolescents, the authors of the BEH recommend “support for single-parent families, the maintenance of extracurricular activities and regular outings”.
They also evoke support for young people whose loved one has contracted Covid-19 or has been hospitalized, with appropriate information.
In France, depression “is the fourth main cause of morbidity and disability in adolescents aged 15 to 19, and the fifteenth for 10-14 years”, recall the authors of the BEH.
Anxiety, it occupies sixth place “among adolescents aged 10 to 14 years and ninth position for 15-19 years”.
Source: Covid-19 weekly epidemiological bulletin, n ° 8, May 20, 2021.
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