James' World 2

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Back-to-school jitters are normal every fall. But as families prepare for the beginning of the 2021–22 school year, these run-of-the-mill worries are colliding with fresh uncertainties about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, leaving kids and parents more anxious than usual.

Parents can use many strategies to help their children handle this challenging situation, according to Elizabeth Reichert, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

“I often talk to parents about being the lighthouse in their child’s storm, the light that shines steadily in a predictable rhythm and doesn’t waver no matter how big the storm is,” Reichert said. “Their job is to be that lighthouse.”

Reichert spoke with science writer Erin Digitale about how parents can help ensure that budding students of any age—from preschool to high school—are ready to handle anxieties as the school year begins.

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Kids Who Are Anxious

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Even if you managed to keep your job, it likely changed in some significant way. And change doesn’t always mean for the better.

Even before Covid-19, more than half of Americans found their job unsatisfactory, according to an annual survey by the Conference Board research group. The nation had been hovering around the halfway mark of job dissatisfaction since at least 2000.

That statistic means half the people you work with every day are living a work-life that Henry David Thoreau would have described as one of “quiet desperation.”

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This essay is part of a column called The Wisdom Project,

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Remote working arrangements can make engaging teams even more challenging for leaders. Many of us are feeling increased anxiety, and that can be a big distraction when it comes to focusing on work.

“Right now, we’re in a crisis of belonging,” says Edward Sullivan, CEO of Velocity Group, an executive coaching firm focused on early-stage startups. “Not only are people staying home and dealing with challenges of the pandemic, such as the health of their loved ones and teaching and rearing children; they’re also dealing with loss of connection with coworkers. Leaders are challenged with continuing to create feelings of connectedness.”

While several companies addressed the issue at the start of the pandemic with Zoom happy hours and games, the solutions weren’t always effective. “Often these events turned into 40 people staring at each other, which felt awkward,” says Sullivan. “What is working is having smaller numbers of people getting together and leaders proactively reaching out to connect one-on-one with their employees.”

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Photo by Yuliia Kutsaieva/Getty Images

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It was two weeks, originally. Who couldn’t do two weeks with the kids at home? Two weeks to bend the curve. It was simple.

Then it was two months—because nothing bent—and, well, we did two weeks and that went okay, so two months would be doable, right? Right?

And then it was summer, and kids are always home in the summer, so how was that different? Sure, we can’t go anywhere, but we’ll just do a little more TV, a little more iPad, a little more of everything we’re already doing. Besides, school is just around the corner and finally, they’ll go back.

Except they didn’t. Instead, it was a year in limbo: school on stuttering Zoom, school in person, and then back home again for quarantine, school all the time and none of the time. No part of it was good, for kids or parents, but most parts of it were safe, and somehow, impossibly, we made it through a full year. It was hell, but we did it. We did it.

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Bing Guan / Bloomberg / Getty

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There was an aphorism in the movement: “Bad roads make good communes.” And the road we’re on today is bad. Several miles inland from California’s foggy coastline, we’re driving down a single lane hemmed in by 50-foot fir trees and then turn onto a rocky dirt path, joggling our rented SUV. Photographer Michael Schmelling and I are in Mendocino County, about a three-hour drive north of San Francisco, looking for what remains of perhaps the most famous of the hundreds of rural communes established across Northern California in the late ’60s and ’70s: Table Mountain Ranch.

The entire expanse—which once was a kind of American Arcadia, home to scores of hippies who’d fled San Francisco to live a new, idealistic kind of life—now looks deserted. We pass tree stumps, logging equipment, and mounds of dirt. The only sound is the chirping of birds. Eventually, in the middle of an open field, we come upon a peeling wood building where a lone man is perched up a ladder. Ascetically thin, with long red hair and a patchy beard, he tells us that he’s one of Table Mountain Ranch’s last remaining members. Now in his mid-70s, he’s wary of supplying his name, wary of being somehow “on the map” after so much time off the grid, so I tell him that I’ll refer to him as Jack Berg. Attempting to set the foundation for a second-story balcony, he struggles to balance on the ladder while positioning a two-by-four, an unlit roach in his fingers. As we look on, he brusquely puts us to work, chastising Michael for snapping a picture instead of immediately helping with the load.

Berg is restoring the Whale Schoolhouse, a progressive academy founded in 1971 that became the pride of communards across the Albion region of Northern California. Fifty kids, from elementary to high school age, were enrolled here, but it’s sat unused for decades—and now Berg is moving in. “Nobody cared about this building,” he says. “It was disintegrating.” He takes us inside. It’s a single room, the size of half a tennis court, with old class pictures on a corkboard. A circular window overlooks an empty field that had long ago been a playground.

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An abandoned structure at the Nonagon commune in Humboldt County.

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