Sofia, May 13 (BTA) - Not only has the pandemic led children to
lose their motivation to study, but that has also been
compounded by a new phenomenon of students refusing to return to
 in-person learning at school, child psychologist Mihail
Mihailov said in a BTA interview. Other than that, the pandemic
has not led to a larger than usual number of mental complaints
among children and youths.
   
The loss of motivation is observed even among those who always
had a positive attitude to school and learning, the psychologist
 said. That is because school is not only where one gains
knowledge but also where students' social life largely takes
place and where they interact with peers, authorities
(teachers), and institutions (the school). "There they built
friendships, fall in love, develop an identity and self-esteem,
and when this environment is lost, they have nowhere to satisfy
their social needs," says Mihailov.

Teachers are another factor that influences motivation, and if
they lose their motivation and desire to work, the students
immediately sense that and it influences them, the expert
explains.

It is more difficult to identify the reasons why some students
refuse to be back to in-person schooling because often it is the
 same students who also refuse to talk to a psychologist, making
 the problem hard to study. What psychologists do is first try
to find out whether or not it is a mental problem they are
dealing with. If it is not, they find that two explanations are
most common.
   
One is that going to school is often not seen as an obligation
but as a matter of personal wish (to go or not to go to school).
 Young people usually live in a world dominated by their
connection with their parents, usually the mother. "The
connection with the mother dominates to an extent where the
child manipulates the parent if they want to manipulate the
reality. With such connections, what the reality and society
require are of secondary importance," explains the school
psychologist.

With younger students the problem may be that their process of
adapting to school was interrupted by the lockdown and had to
start from scratch after the reopening.

Young students - as well as some older ones - also found it
difficult to move the school framework to the environment of
their home: when to study, when to play, when to eat and so on.
Students associate their home with certain activities and they
cannot perceive it as a classroom unless it is part of a game,
Mihailov says.

He explains that the reason for this is that children under the
age of 12 do not have fully developed abstract thinking. 

For some children, however, the period of online learning proved
 a chance to improve their grades. These are children who had
difficult relations with peers and teachers. When such relations
 are no longer a problem, then an online student may improve
their grades. BR