Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on our Social Relationships
By: Redya Reinarto
Edited by: Anna Carmelita
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected people's psychological and social well-being. It has led to massive social unhappiness and unforeseen changes in our way of life, employment, and social relations. There have been some social effects from it like separation and the closing of public gathering places such as parks, cafes, churches, schools, and colleges.
For most teens, our teenage years can already be considered as a challenging phase, even without the effect of a pandemic. On top of it, the trauma, stress, fear, grief, and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, and you may feel completely overwhelmed. Secondly, due to the closing of schools and universities in numerous places, more than one billion young people are currently not enrolled in school.
Staying at home for a really long period of time can cause more pressure on most people, including me. When the pandemic hit, I was overly excited about the fact that we didn’t need to go to school, but as time went by, I started to feel bored, lonely, and I started to experience trouble focusing, especially during online classes.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in long-stress exposure. Researchers have become more interested in researching the social effects of the pandemic. During the quarantine, research has shown that parents generally see behavioral and emotional changes in their children; which include symptoms of attention problems, boredom, anger, restlessness, anxiousness, a feeling of loneliness, unease, and anxiety.
Though it should be acknowledged that teachers, school administrators, and local and national governments did their best to deal with the exceptional conditions, the interruption to education and learning may also have effects on the quality of education, the lower education quality and success rate itself also affected students’ social life, which lowers self-esteem and social skill that are usually shaped in school with face-to-face learning system.
Thus, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our social relationships have been insurmountable - it has changed the way we gather with our loved ones in public, our schooling experience and the general way in which we view our daily lives.