The three-week isolation seriously affected the psyche of many Russian teenagers. In the absence of fresh air and full communication with friends, children increasingly become aggressive and blame their parents for their troubles. Helpline employees note a significant increase in the number of calls from young people during the quarantine period. And if at the beginning of the epidemic, children's requests were mainly related to depression and suicidal thoughts, then in recent days, adolescents are increasingly complaining about relatives, often without good reason. There are even followers of Pavlik Morozov who are figuring out how to turn over their parents to the guardianship authorities or the police.
photo: pixabay.com
In the capital, there was a story about a 12-year-old schoolboy who handed over his own mother to the police. The boy came to one of the police departments of the southwestern district and said that his quarantined parent began to drink hard, yell at him, and turn on loud music at night. In this case, the information was confirmed, at the time of the proceedings, the child was taken to the children's hospital.
At the same time, in different regions of the country, there were several cases of teenagers fleeing from quite prosperous families. When found by the police, most of the children claimed that they had been forced to flee their homes due to the aggressive behavior of the adults. However, in each of the cases, it turned out that the children were simply tired of sitting within four walls.
- Problems with our 16-year-old daughter began about a year ago, says Elena from New Moscow. - My daughter dropped out of school, was constantly rude, there were cases when she did not even come home to spend the night, and we called her for hours from classmates. When we had to isolate ourselves at home, Katya was freaked out. The daughter blames us for her troubles, as she is sure that the virus is not dangerous for her personally. Accordingly, we do not think about her, but only about our elderly grandmother, and about ourselves, of course. She does not complete school assignments, sleeps almost all day, and hangs out on social networks at night. A couple of days ago, her husband took the gadget from her in the evening, to which she said that she would hand over us to custody and the police and deprive us of parental rights for her little brother.
The operator of one of the hotlines for children and adolescents told us that the quarantine had a very strong impact on the behavior of young people:
“Calls from children with complaints about their parents have become more frequent lately. In particular, there were several such calls on my shift. Of course, most of it concerned psychological problems with parents, misunderstanding on the part of adults. This is understandable, in ordinary life, adolescents spend much less time with adults, and conflicts do not reach the acute phase. The adults themselves are on the edge now, they began to break more of the children. For some teenagers, it comes to aggression and even hatred towards their elders. Specifically, I spoke with two young people who complained about serious clashes with their parents and found out how and to whom you can officially complain about it. At the same time, it was absolutely clear from the conversation that there was no question of any domestic violence or failure to comply with parental responsibilities, these children were driven only by resentment and aggression. Of course, we do our best to calm such avengers. There were a lot of questions about the actions of the guardianship authorities in our country before the coronavirus, so it is completely unclear how they will behave in such a situation. It’s good if they just don’t react, but they can come with a check. Adults are now already under stress from this whole pandemic situation, they just do not have enough of such proceedings."
