Unable to do school using Zoom
Hi. My daughter is almost 16 years old and just finished 10th grade. She used to be a great student but failed most of her 10th grade classes with Fs due to anxiety (and possibly depression) which started during distance learning because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our public schools were closed for 1.5 years. My daughter is now back to her old self and doing well in school, but during distance learning she was unable to keep up with Zoom classes when she had to work in small groups. She used to disconnect without warning and said she couldn't handle being on Zoom working on small teams. Even though she seems to be doing well now with in-person school I am worried that if her class(es) are quarantined, and they have to again go back to Zoom, the same pattern will repeat again. So, I am trying to see if somebody might be able to diagnose the cause of these issues so, if we face a similar situation again, we may avoid the same outcome. Any suggestions on how to find out what caused this behavior and how to prevent it in the future? Any recommendations? Thanks in advance!
Parent Replies
Hi. Your description of your daughter's situation is pretty high level, so I don't feel as though I can offer very specific input in response; but there was enough resonance that I thought a brief description of my own daughter's challenges might serve some purpose for you.
Our kid was a top student through 9th grade; but her 9th grade year wasn't also absolutely traumatic. She wound up withdrawing from her local private day school and going across the country, to a private boarding school--at her own insistence--for 10th grade. She barely scraped through a semester there before she had a pretty profound collapse (depression, anxiety, disordered eating) and came home, completing her 10th grade year at a local one-on-one learning academy. From there, despite the fact that we had her working with a psychologist, eating disorder specialist, and psychiatrist (again, per her own request), things only got worse.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, after three years of trying treatments for anxiety and depression, and three more school placements, she finally, finally was given a diagnosis of bipolar II, and was also given meds appropriate to that diagnosis (as opposed to the wide variety meds she had been given over the previous three years for depression and mitigation of OCD).
MAGIC. Oh my gosh, just world-changing.
She's now living independently and attending community college away from home.
All of this is to say: Don't spend your time worrying about whether or not there will be quarantine days ahead. Stay focused, even now while daughter is feeling good, on making sure you have systems in place that will help you and her get to the clearest possible understanding of what underlies the depression/anxiety she experienced in the quarantine times. It's possible that it was exactly what it seemed on the face of things, but a broad inability to cope with having to be present in small-group interactions over zoom....that could be something other, and more specific, than generalized anxiety.
Good luck to you and your daughter.