What Will Social Re-Entry Look Like for Our Youth?

By Amy Carpenter, LCSW, Author of Be Strong, Be Wise: The Young Adult’s Guide to Sexual Assault Awareness and Personal Safety

All of us are observing changes in the way we socialize as a result of the pandemic. I can’t remember the last time I shook someone’s hand and even casual hugging still feels suspect. It may be months before we adjust to what this stage of the new normal will look like, so what will social re-entry mean for teens and young adults whose development, individuation, and identity centers around interacting with other young people? As any parent knows, teens care greatly about what other teens think, wear, say and do, much more than they care about what their family members are up to. Given what we know of this life stage, there may be learning opportunities for assisting young people in using some of what they discovered in the past year in service to better boundaries in general.

As someone who works with teens ‘on the regular,’ I was amazed at how the young people I knew handled the challenge of social restrictions. A primal life-stage-enhanced phenomenon took over and along with it a distinct group mentality set in. Suddenly, it wasn’t cool to go unmasked. Significant judgement might occur if an individual decided to go renegade and say, share their water bottle with someone else. My guess is that in every teen circle there were those who bucked the protocol since young people were among those least likely to follow the guidelines. The point is that however often they may have failed, there were as many occasions when they got it right, and often at significant social cost.

The challenges of the past year have changed us and most likely we will approach human connection, intimacy, fun and freedom from a new and wizened vantage point. While adults account for and observe these changes, young people experience them in ways that impact their development and self-concept: Do I worry about getting too close to other people? Do I go to a gathering with people I don’t know well? Do I trust that all my friends can be together unmasked when I don’t know who has been vaccinated? These are just a few of the questions young people might ask themselves and each other.

As with every aspect of the pandemic, there are several truths that exist simultaneously for young people. Many teens have struggled with anxiety and depression as a result of Covid, while others have declared that social distancing and online classes were easier for them. Either way, there is cause for hope since teens will most likely return quickly and with great gusto to business-as-usual with their friends and social contacts. Parents and caring adults may even worry that they will re-enter with less intuitive skill and sound judgement, since they were effectively “benched” from the game of social skill-building for eighteen months. But with all the lost opportunities and lonely moments, many young people have also learned that they have resilience, and are global citizens responsible for their own health and well-being, along with contributing to the well-being of the community in which they live. Teens have had to use common sense and rely on their intuitive skills in order to navigate the challenges of the past year. How their intuition has served them- what their gut instinct tells them and what they do in response- these are questions that support not only their medical safety, but their physical and sexual safety as well.

In the Be Strong, Be Wise program, we ask teens reflective questions that build self-knowledge and a better understanding of personal boundaries, as well as ways to communicate them. Here are some questions about the social distance experience that may help teens integrate the intuitive skills they acquired in the past year and a half:

1) Due to social distance over the past year, would you say you now approach social experiences differently, and if so, how?

3) Did you ever have to rely on your intuition to manage risky social scenarios during the pandemic? If yes, what did that intuitive reaction feel like to you when a scenario wasn’t “Covid Safe”?

4) Would you say you learned to trust your gut instinct more as a result of Covid, if so, how?

5) Would you say you have more common sense than you did before the pandemic, if so, how and in what ways?

6) How do you communicate your boundaries now as a result of a year of social restriction? Would you say you are more comfortable communicating your boundaries now than you were before?