We’re dedicated to the mission of helping children and families coping with anxiety and related problems, and to research that advances our understanding of these problems and how to treat them. When the COVID-19 pandemic changed all of our lives seemingly overnight, it also wreaked havoc on the lives of our youth. Children were thrown into sudden uncertainty and unpredictability. They became separated from their peers and from the routines that made up their daily lives. And too many experienced first-hand the tragic loss of lives and livelihoods that swept across the world.
We knew it was imperative that we, like our colleagues across the Child Study Center, continue to be there for children and their parents. To provide the support and the treatment they need to cope with these challenges, to help them maintain their wellbeing despite all that was occurring, and to best prepare them for the day after, when they would be expected to resume those functions that were suspended.
Leveraging our prior experience in working with children exposed to natural disasters, terrorism, and other catastrophes, we immediately began providing tele-treatment, sometimes coaching parents or children in the basic skills of navigating a zoom meeting or logging into a session. Even as we worked to put in places the safety procedures that would enable children to come and meet their therapist in person at the first possible moment, we ensured that no child in our care was left without contact or therapy.
Through countless interviews on radio and television, in print and online, from CNN to Al-Arabiya we have been there for the broader public as well, offering guidance and support to parents struggling to adapt the new and constantly changing realities. We held parent sessions, consulted to schools on remote learning as well as the return to classrooms, and offered online webinars for both the lay and professional public.
We knew it was imperative that we, like our colleagues across the Child Study Center, continue to be there for children and their parents.
Eli Lebowitz, PhD
We also adapted our research methods, administering assessments through electronic surveys and clinical interviews over tele-sessions, so that we could continue to pursue the critical goal of studying the causes, course, and treatment of childhood anxiety. Working in collaboration with colleagues both in and beyond our department, we tried to ‘make lemonade’ out of the very sour lemons that life was throwing at us all, designing innovative new studies to understand the impact that an unprecedented event such as this pandemic has on children’s mental health and neurobiology. We see this research as continuing our past efforts and as part of a global effort that will help to make sense of the current events, as well teaching us how to better prepare children to handle any future large-scale disaster.
We are still in the midst of this pandemic, and its end sometimes seems like an ever-receding horizon, but we will continue our work on behalf of children, parents and families, and together we will get through!