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We all know the聽challenges lockdowns are creating聽for our children during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, providing effective support for their social and emotional well-being may help us look beyond fears to the possibility of making gains during this interruption to our familiar lives.

Social and emotional well-being relates to the ability to understand ourselves, and others, and to manage life鈥檚 challenges. This calls for skills such as being able to:

• understand and engage with our emotions and the emotions of others
• form and build positive relationships
• take on and persist with challenges.

Well-being聽is a broad concept that encompasses the individual and their context, recognising variation among children. It鈥檚 crucial to remember well-being is a process of both experience and development, so skills vary with age and circumstances.

Loss of well-being was shown to be the聽聽of lockdowns for students schooling from home in 2020.

The experience of schooling during lockdown varies, but the greatest impact is that it聽makes existing inequities worse. The lives of too many children and young people are filled with enormous difficulty and limited opportunities. This was the聽case before lockdown, but the problem has grown.

Schools continue to聽work tirelessly to meet students鈥� needs. It is important to recognise there are social issues that require extensive work beyond schooling.

The individual aspect of social and emotional well-being involves the ongoing development of key skills. These skills have been variously termed soft skills, 21st-century skills, general capabilities, and dispositions. These skills grow and develop as our life experience expands and the challenges we encounter become more complex.

The benefits of developing social and emotional well-being are important in themselves. However, research has long shown the聽benefits extend to academic learning.

Well-being skills have been recognised as helping students with schooling during lockdown.聽Self-organisation, autonomy聽and聽adaptability聽enable students to thrive during lockdown. Schooling during lockdown also provides an opportunity to develop these skills in the context of life鈥檚 other challenges.

What can we do to support our children鈥檚 well-being in lockdown and beyond through the pandemic?

1. Focus on the potential gains.

We don鈥檛 simply 鈥渂ounce back鈥� from adversity; we need to be able to聽move forward聽by supporting our children to work with the challenge of adversity. This includes adults in their lives modelling how to do that, which helps children develop the skills to cope with further adversity that they will inevitably face in their lives.

Research is聽聽through schooling under lockdown, as聽the latest NAPLAN results also indicate. It is showing聽gains can be made by working with the situation.

2. Look after our own well-being.

Remember the聽oxygen mask principle聽鈥� we need to take care of ourselves to be able to support our children鈥檚 well-being. Children develop the skills to聽self-regulate聽鈥� that is, they learn to understand and manage their own emotions 鈥� when supported through聽co-regulation with adults. We can only do that when we are taking care of our own well-being.

3. Attend to daily essentials for all.

Play, exercise, get outdoors, socialise and聽monitor engagement with news media. Each of these activities will look different from what we would choose outside of lockdown, and there are lots of possibilities.

Engaging in unfamiliar ways of doing our everyday activities builds our well-being by developing our ability to be flexible in our thinking and聽adapt聽to changing situations.

4. Develop personal skills.

Key skills include self-organisation, autonomy, flexible thinking and adaptability. Well-being is learned through explicit approaches, life experiences and modelling.

We can support children by helping with routines and organisation to enable them to not be overwhelmed.

At the same time, encourage independence through activities they complete without you, such as a Lego challenge. Some other simple things to do include: encourage聽reading, play board games, promote聽creative (tech-free) play聽and teach simple strategies to cope with stress such as the聽5, 4, 3, 2, 1 grounding technique.

5. Adjust expectations to the situation.

As we adapt to the circumstances, our expectations need to adapt. Kids will have more screen time for schooling, socialising and, yes,聽gaming, which will support their well-being.

Kids will get distracted, have ebbs and flows in motivation, won鈥檛 complete everything for school, will refuse to do some things and will need to take time away from schooling. Give space for this to be acceptable. Remember to model how you manage your own distractions and other responses to working in this different context.

Also, stress looks different in kids. They might be rude, defiant, angry and avoid doing things - even the things they love.

The dominant approach to children鈥檚 behaviour at home and school is reward and punishment. It induces a stress response to聽trigger change in behaviour, so only escalates the stress our children are experiencing now.

Talk and listen to each other鈥檚 concerns to find solutions. Recognise when things aren鈥檛 a priority for now, such as cleaning their bedroom every week.

There is room for us to gain from the experience of lockdown. We might just need to shift our focus.

Dr Nikki Brunker is a lecturer in Education. Her research interests include children鈥檚 social and emotional wellbeing, Initial Teacher Education pedagogy, alternative schooling and innovative qualitative methodologies.

This article was first published in The Conversation as . All photos by Unsplash.