--- title: Anxious About Returning to Work or School? What to Do description: Psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy helps parents and kids cope with back-to-school and back-to-work anxiety. canonical: https://time.com/6080708/dr-becky-back-to-school-anxiety/ author: Becky Kennedy article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-07-16T11:00:36.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:03:45.618Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Anxious About Returning to Work or School? What to Do og:description: Psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy helps parents and kids cope with back-to-school and back-to-work anxiety. og:url: https://time.com/6080708/dr-becky-back-to-school-anxiety/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt30470bd9009ba27f/698a1b10656a3f97febdb6ff/post-covid-anxiety.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: post-covid-anxiety og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Anxious About Returning to Work or School? What to Do twitter:description: Psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy helps parents and kids cope with back-to-school and back-to-work anxiety. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt30470bd9009ba27f/698a1b10656a3f97febdb6ff/post-covid-anxiety.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Anxious About Returning to "Normal Life"? 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A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=c4d37eff-5572-4eff-be2c-9fee330f1844&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: What Kids Learned From the COVID-19 Pandemic [Watch (HLS stream): What Kids Learned From the COVID-19 Pandemic](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/0rv0kxon.m3u8) (5:48)  _Published 2021-06-09. Too many young generations have been shaped by the global crises they faced—Depression-era poverty, Cold War nuclear fears. Add to them the COVID generation._ by [Becky Kennedy](https://time.com/author/becky-kennedy/) ## Becky Kennedy Jul 16, 2021 11:00 AM UTC  There are ways to untangle anxiety and make it work in our favor, not just in the moment but for years to come. There are ways to untangle anxiety and make it work in our favor, not just in the moment but for years to come. Getty Images by [Becky Kennedy](https://time.com/author/becky-kennedy/) ## Becky Kennedy Jul 16, 2021 11:00 AM UTC I’m feeling a bit confused this July. I can’t figure out if I am living a pandemic life, a post-pandemic life, or somewhere in between. And while I try to stay present in the moment, my mind keeps wandering to what the fall will be like. For a lot of us, September will bring a return of many elements of pre-COVID adult life: working from an office, going on business trips, attending large in-person events, sending kids back to in-person school. While we may expect these transitions to be met with relief or excitement—finally, “re-entry” and “a return to normal”!—it’s critical to prepare ourselves and our families for relief _and_ anxiety, excitement _and_ sadness. After 16 months of COVID-19 in the U.S., we’ve all adapted to a very different life, one marked by restriction and hypervigilance. It will take time to unlearn our pandemic-life habits. A client in my practice shared that she had an anxiety attack when she entered her first meeting with unmasked adults. An Instagram follower just DMed me that she panicked on her first airplane flight since 2019\. Here’s the thing: these reactions are uncomfortable and also normal, and the more you expect them, the more prepared you’ll be to manage the post-pandemic transition. And the more ready you are, the more ready your children will feel, too. The first thing parents—and anyone experiencing return-to-normal fears—must do is cope with this sometimes overwhelming anxiety. You can practice this coping strategy in advance: Acknowledge-Validate-Permit or, as I shorten it, AVP. Acknowledge by _noticing_ a feeling, validate by telling yourself why the feeling _makes sense_, and then give yourself _permission_ to be having that feeling. Think to yourself: “I’m noticing I’m feeling pretty tense as I take the train into work today. That makes sense, after all, I haven’t done this in a while and the world has changed a ton since March 2020! I’m allowed to feel nervous as I make this transition.” AVPs are a critical strategy in coping with anxiety and change. Beyond coping with anxiety, we will, of course, still have to keep moving forward. The fall will bring a return to decision making; instead of the government and medical professionals making decisions for us, it will be up to us to decide whether we want to attend a concert or allow our kids to attend a sleepover. There are no right choices here. Decision making amidst uncertainty is incredibly hard. I often think about anxiety as an equation: anxiety = uncertainty + our underestimation to cope. Most of us, especially when we have to make decisions, try to minimize uncertainty; some amount of information is helpful, but we all know those times when we go down the rabbit hole of Googling for information that we’ll never find, polling friends for their opinions in the hope that something will feel “just right,” wracking our brains for some “aha” moment that doesn’t exist. The more we try to reduce anxiety by searching for certainty, the worse our anxiety will get. Instead, remind yourself: “There is no certainty here. There’s no _right_. I am making the best decision I can with the information I have available at this time. That’s all I can do.” Take a deep breath and remind yourself: “I am a person who has gotten through hard moments before and I will get through this one now. I can cope with this. I can cope, I can cope, I can cope.” This is how we manage anxiety—not from the uncertainty side of the equation, but from the coping side. Only after you’ve thought about your own coping methods, help your kids with theirs. Kids are on the verge of a major transition. Children are set up to explore the world around them—to learn by doing, touching, and moving around the world. For the past 16 months, we’ve essentially told our kids, “The world is not safe enough to explore. Stay close.” Come September, many of us will be changing our tune, sending our kids back to school buildings they haven’t seen in years. This is a big change for our kids, one that, like our transitions, is likely to be met with a mix of feelings. This is when you can do something I call “emotional vaccination”—we prepare for future feelings and can even “pre-regulate” the feelings by surrounding them with understanding, empathy, and care. A summer conversation with your child might sound like this: “I’m thinking about how you’ll be going back to in-person school, meaning going back to your school building. Did you know that we all, kids and adults, can feel many feelings at the same time? You may feel excited… and nervous! You may feel happy… and sad. That would all make sense. After all, it’s a big change.” Over the next few weeks, wonder with your child: “I wonder what it will be like to go back to school…” and “I wonder what it will be like at drop-off that first day” and then after that, “Let’s make sure to practice a goodbye routine so we have something we know we will do, something that feels familiar to us, as you go back to school.” Separation routines are critical for kids—and parents—to feel safe during this transition, as they add predictability and routine to moments that feel unfamiliar and out of control. Now, take a moment for yourself. Place your feet on the ground and a hand on your heart. Give yourself credit for all you’ve been through. What a year it’s been. You are so strong. Yes, the transition to fall will be tricky, and yes, we can do it. We’ve got this. ## Transcript I never imagined that, at the age of 12, I would be a witness to something so unusual, something that would become history. I was pretty sure that it was just like any other virus outbreak we’ve experienced. I thought that it would soon be over. COVID-19 didn’t seem that real back then. So when the first major wave of COVID cases hit in the United States, our way of life as we knew it was being upended. This was a type of uncertainty that I’d never felt before. I mean, I didn’t have any school, sports or friends to play with. School was cancelled. Then it went virtual. No yearbook signings, no end of year celebrations, nothing. Loneliness, boredom and isolation made me feel pretty gloomy. For over a year, children around the world have adapted to life in a pandemic, navigating new ways of socializing and going to school. I’m wondering when we’re going to start having school without masks because I’m starting to not get used to it. While children as a whole were generally spared from COVID-19’s viral impact, many still suffered from feelings of fear, isolation and loss. It makes me think about what if I make a mistake of taking my mask off accidentally. And it was scary for me because I have reactive airway disease. Due to my condition, my exposure to people outside my family was limited. Before the pandemic, my family visited my aunt in a memory care facility every week. Then she caught COVID-19. Watching her decline was horrible. She passed away on New Year’s Eve, and our family had to hold her funeral virtually. And in rare instances, some children struggled through severe symptoms and hospitalization. It was really bad for me because I was really weak. I could barely get out of bed for around two weeks. I was really sensitive to the light. I had stomach aches and headaches. The headaches have actually persisted up until now. I was also hospitalized and intubated in a ventilator because of a new, rare disease called PMIS, which developed after contracting COVID-19. TIME spoke with child trauma experts about the pandemic’s potential lasting impact on children’s mental and emotional well being. I think that we have reason to suspect that there’s going to be a very big emotional, psychological impact on kids, and there’s still a lot I think that we’re learning about just how extensive that is. We have some experience with how communities and young people cope with disasters. There are two things that are different about this. One is the enormously protracted nature of this chronic stressor. The second is that we were forced to socially distance, and restrain our social interaction, which is not our typical tendency when we're under stress. We know for example those children who have experienced deaths of loved ones will be more vulnerable. They're dealing with many more issues, particularly around grief and loss. We know that children that are in BIPOC communities, have always had disparities, and we're seeing that more and mental health is no different. There’s definitely evidence that mental health service use among kids and adolescents has dropped significantly. School based mental health services are one of the main areas where kids and adolescents receive mental health services from and with so many schools having gone remote for, you know, a very big chunk of the past, over a year now, there's no question that a lot of those services have been disrupted and it's made it a lot harder for kids and adolescents to get mental health services. I think there are curriculums and activities being developed for kids really helping them think flexibly and proactively taking initiative, and understanding how do you cope with these things. You can't control so many aspects of this, but what can you control? We need to really think about how do we infuse strong positive relationships both at home and at school. Because we know from the science that one caring adult, just one, can make a complete difference in the trajectory of a child's life. Experts will need more time to develop a fuller understanding of the pandemic’s lasting psychological impact. But children are resilient, and they are already drawing their own lessons from their experiences. I think one of the best things to come out of this pandemic was realizing how much enjoyment there really is in the little things. I learned how much we rely on human interaction, especially in person human interaction, looking someone in the eye, being able to give someone a hug. 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