Playing through the Covid-19 crisis

The Covid-19 pandemic is not only upending people’s normal habits, but it has also seen the introduction of new — sometimes unfamiliar and uncomfortable — strategies to help slow the spread of the virus. Some of those strategies – social distancing, more thorough hygiene habits — are difficult enough for adults to adopt. But it can prove even more challenging for children and young adolescents, particularly if they are too young to easily understand the underlying significance.

Organizations that work regularly with young people are grappling with how to encourage young people to adopt practices that can help keep them and the people around them safe, but without provoking unnecessary fear or trauma. They are turning to solutions that draw on the experience and knowledge of the young people, themselves, and that build on traditional strategies, like play or the arts, while recasting them to reflect the new reality.

The Central Australian Youth Link-Up Service (CAYLUS) works with indigenous communities across the bottom half of the country’s Northern Territory, providing a range of support, including rehabilitation services and technological access. They are communities that are particularly vulnerable to disease, lacking easy access to hygiene and sanitation services and higher rates of chronic illnesses than in other parts of the country.

Because much of CAYLUS’ work centres on engaging young people around healthier activities, as Covid-19 emerged as a threat, they were prepared with some strategies to help the young people in their program mitigate their own risk, but also the danger to their broader communities.

Arts and play-based activities can be essential both to communicating complex ideas

To help explain the concept of social distancing and to encourage children to practice it, they created a game — corona cricket — where staying apart is the key to victory. In the game, runners are being chased across a field by defenders carrying long, foam noodles. A tap of the noodle freezes the runners on the spot, where they must cover their nose and mouth with their arm. They can be rescued only if a teammate tosses them a ball, while anyone who touches another player is automatically out.

“We’re trying to meet people where they are,” CAYLUS’s Operations Manage Blair McFarland said. “We’re not trying to corral people into new things. We’re putting the word out and advertising strategies that people could embrace.”

The need to socially distance can make organizing play-based activities difficult

The idea, McFarland said, is to encourage children to engage with the concept of social distancing, but through an activity that didn’t feel like learning — one of the benefits of play identified by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Identifying play as an important element of child development, the authors of 2018 recommendations on integrating play into children’s lives, underscored the role it has in fostering social skills, including how to listen to directions, pay attention and focus on tasks without constant supervision.

Arts and play-based activities can be essential both to communicating complex ideas, but also in the actual process of working with young people to design interventions that help respond to a situation.

“Having arts-based, play-based activities get young people thinking and looking at issues from a fresh perspective,” said Vanessa Currie, the executive director of the International Institute for Child Rights and Development (IICRD). “It really helps to use tools to better mobilize or support what young people are already doing.” IICRD is a Canadian charity that both researches how to better understand young people’s views and designs interventions around the world that bring young people into the process of designing policies and programs.

The need to socially distance can make organizing these kinds of activities difficult where groups of children are not already quarantining together, though. That has necessitated designing new ways to engage young people in thinking about how to protect themselves and also new interventions that are culturally appropriate and build on existing traditions.

What are we doing to make sure that young people can play an active part in the responses that are designed?

In addition to corona cricket, which may be difficult to organize under stricter conditions, CAYLUS has also launched contests where winning requires young people to practice good hygiene. The idea is to help to protect them from getting Covid-19, but without being overly didactic. The most popular intervention is a selfie contest, where young people are encouraged to scrub, dress outrageously and submit a photo of themselves with hashtagged #CaylusChallenge. Each month a winner receives phone credit.

“It’s a sneaky hygiene strategy,” McFarland said, but wrapped up in the kind of online activities young people are engaging with, anyway. They are also running music video contests, encouraging young people to write songs about washing their hands, not touching their face and coughing into their arms.

Whether these or any interventions to help protect young people are ultimately successful will hinge, Currie said, on how engaged children are in the actual process of designing and implementing them.

“One thing that we’ve seen, at least at first, was a lot of top-down information and not talking to young people and asking their opinion,” she said. “Now that we’ve been in this pandemic for a couple of months, there are a lot of conversations around, ‘What are we doing to make sure that young people can play an active part in the responses that are designed?’”

Policymakers are increasingly trying to leverage the networks and relationships that existed before the pandemic began, like CAYLUS, to work with youth to identify and design strategies to effectively raise awareness of how they can protect themselves and their communities. — Andrew Green

(Picture credit: Unsplash)