Summer: Season to Prepare Children FOR SEISMIC CHANGE & NEW HABITATS

Beyond relaxation and skill-building, the long summer break also provides parents valuable opportunities to prepare children mentally and emotionally for major transitions such as changing schools, moving home and adapting to new environments and habitats

- KIRAN BALIMANE & CYNTHIA JOHN

Summer holidays are a time of rest and recuperation for children, to enable them to recharge for the new academic year.

It's also a time when they can leisurely pursue extracurricular interests and talents in music, dance, art, and sports through special summer camps and activity programmes. But beyond relaxation and skill-building, the long break also provides parents valuable opportunities to prepare children mentally and emotionally for change and transition.

Whether it is attending a new school, moving to a higher class, adjusting to unfamiliar teachers and classmates, coping with changing academic expectations, moving to a new house/city, transitions provoke a mix of excitement, anxiety, and uncertainty. Children may not always express these emotions freely, but major transitions profoundly affect their confidence, behaviour and sense of security. Summer holidays provide an ideal interregnum for parents to help children develop emotional resilience, adaptability and confidence before the new academic year begins.

Such preparation and emotional readiness is becoming increasingly important at a time when childhood stress and anxiety are on the rise globally. A 2024 US-based National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH) reported that 7 percent of children aged 6-11 years experience anxiety. Likewise, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), one in seven adolescents aged 10-19 years worldwide experiences a mental disorder. In India, a 2022 survey of class VI-XII school students conducted by the National Council for Educational Research & Training (NCERT) found that 11 percent of students experience anxiety, 14 percent extreme emotions, and 43 percent suffer mood swings.