Jonathan was an avid soccer player, a dedicated student and a social young man who enjoyed spending time with his friends. However, by the time he limped into our clinic after a year of chronic knee pain, he was not attending school, was withdrawn from his peers, had retreated to his room and was worried about the unpredictability of his future.
As psychologists at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Mayo Family Pediatric Pain Rehabilitation Center, we work with youths who have severe and debilitating chronic pain. Kids and teens who enroll in our program typically have withdrawn from everyday activities to reduce or avoid worsening their pain. We have dubbed this coping approach “comfortably uncomfortable.” Counterintuitively, returning to daily life while coping with pain is an essential step toward reaching the ultimate treatment goal: pain relief.
We see a parallel between our patients’ experiences and what many schoolchildren and their families have faced during the pandemic: Remote learning provided many kids relief from struggles such as academic pressure, emotional angst and social stress. Now, they or their parents may be resisting a return to “normal,” because they have become comfortable with this unconventional form of schooling.
We worry that this problem will become pervasive as the school year starts — that families will make the comfortably uncomfortable choice of sticking with remote learning to avoid confronting other problems. Some schools are returning to full-time in-person classes, but others are planning hybrid models, with both in-person and online learning. Although safety concerns or other circumstances may make a hybrid model or online-only schooling appropriate for some families, a knee-jerk choice to go remote can create a slippery slope of avoidance of what may have caused distress before the pandemic.
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