By Lindsey Geiss, Northeast Ohio Parent, May 10, 2020
“Llama! Llama!” shouts a 5-year-old on a walk through the park with her dad.
An average adult llama is five to six feet long — her family’s light-hearted way to measure physical distance in public. Later at home, she does yoga while her older sister dances. It’s important to frame serious conversations, including those related to coronavirus, in developmentally appropriate terms without being too dramatic or ambiguous. And, building physical activity into daily schedules helps relieve stress while providing structure. No one understands this quite like their father, Dr. John Ackerman, a clinical child and adolescent psychologist and suicide prevention coordinator at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Center of Suicide Prevention and Research (CSPR) in Columbus.
“Across the country, rates of anxiety and distress — dealing with isolation, uncertainty and lack of connection — seem to be increasing,” Ackerman says. “We are not necessarily seeing an increase in outreach to suicide crisis lines and ER visits for behavioral issues, but that might be misleading. A lot of people are focusing on pressing health and physical needs and probably not attending to the stress and trauma aspects that may unfold over time.”
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