I just can’t send my children back to school

[Ijustcantcope]

I have always been anxious about Covid. I’m vulnerable, DH is older and I help take care of elderly parents. I took my children out of school just before lockdown as I was bloody petrified.

I managed to send them back for their week in June and then in September although my anxiety levels were high. When they broke up for half term it was a blessed relief. I could finally sleep well and eat. I felt relaxed and happy.

But now as going back to school is looming I’ve got the sick feeling back again. I couldn’t get to sleep last night and had a good cry.

I’ve always had health anxiety around the children which was caused by 10 miscarriages before I had them, then 1 of them having a lot of medical issues. I had just got better with it and now this.

One child is desperate to go to school, the other one isn’t bothered. I am a supply teacher (not working at the moment) so am happy to home school them and they did well over lockdown. But I feel guilty about them missing all the things they love about school.

I just feel that if I knew what was coming e.g. if we were going to lockdown again or there was going to be a vaccine I could make a more informed decision. I’m just so worried about making a wrong one. Either way, it’s going to be shit.

What if the vaccine doesnt work and this goes on for years. I can’t protect us all then. Some days I feel like just going out there and catching it. If I end up dying or my parents do well then that’s it. If we don’t we can move on without all this worry.

I don’t think I can take much more.

And I can’t seek help for my anxiety. I’ve tried. Apparently someone will contact me for talking therapy within 24 weeks.

@Friendsoftheearth

As long as you are willing to accept that your dd may well suffer terribly with both loneliness and potentially MH issues then just keep them at home.

I don't think you are being fair to your children, at all. Especially given covid is here to stay, you would be better advised getting to grips with your anxiety and making a long term plan around your parents.

1-2% risk is tiny! I would be happy with that. So it is matter for you.

People have very contradictory ways of assessing risk. 1-2% risk is "tiny" in this context apparently. But I doubt many people would go on a plane if it had a 1-2% chance of crashing. That's an absurdly high risk that would decimate the airline industry (the actual risk of dying in a plane crash is 0.00001%).

There's no 1-2% risk unless you're in a high risk category. They have a covid risk calculator online to determine your risk of dying from it. At nearly forty, mine came up as 99.9948% chance of not dying from it and I think that was even overestimated.

An elderly person or someone with a suppressed immune system will be very high risk so they need to be shielded. Morbidly obese people can be at risk. Most people aren't and people need to get a sense of perspective.

Healthy kids are at no risk of covid but children who are isolated from their peers, denied appropriate education and given a terror of dying if they leave their homes are going to develop lifelong mental health issues which will destroy their lives and may lead to suicide when they're older.

It's very selfish for parents to do that to their kids just so they can feed their anxiety addiction.

@ReneeRol

There's no 1-2% risk unless you're in a high risk category. They have a covid risk calculator online to determine your risk of dying from it. At nearly forty, mine came up as 99.9948% chance of not dying from it and I think that was even overestimated.

An elderly person or someone with a suppressed immune system will be very high risk so they need to be shielded. Morbidly obese people can be at risk. Most people aren't and people need to get a sense of perspective.

Healthy kids are at no risk of covid but children who are isolated from their peers, denied appropriate education and given a terror of dying if they leave their homes are going to develop lifelong mental health issues which will destroy their lives and may lead to suicide when they're older.

It's very selfish for parents to do that to their kids just so they can feed their anxiety addiction.

Your previous post from this thread was removed. Berating someone for selfishly feeding their “anxiety addition” as though that’s their underlying objective is belittling and profoundly counterproductive. Especially if that person genuinely suffers from anxiety problems.

I’ve calculated my risk on the official calculator. It’s between 1 and 2 % of death.

What official calculator?

@ReneeRol

It is selfish when you're using anxiety to deprive your children of their necessary social, emotional and educational needs.

That's child abuse and it will have long term catastrophic impact on their lives, there's no excuse.

OP isn’t “using” her anxiety to do anything. She’s not instumentalizing it or exploiting it. She and her partner have vulnerabilities, and they have commitments to other vulnerable people. It’s a simple (or not so simple) case of a conflict of interest.

You’re not only catastrophizing, but kicking someone when they’re struggling with a difficult decision. Deplorable.

@ReneeRol

It is selfish when you're using anxiety to deprive your children of their necessary social, emotional and educational needs.

That's child abuse and it will have long term catastrophic impact on their lives, there's no excuse.

Thank you for that! It’s comments like that that make me want to just go out and catch it and get it over with. If I die,I die.

Everything I do in my life is for my children and always will be, especially as I had such a long and hard road to get them.

Thank you to everyone who offered food for thought. I need to leave this thread now though for my own mental health.

I’m sorry OP. Your original post shows what a difficult time you’ve already had when it comes to children, and you should be offered understanding and reasoned support, even if people disagree you with your choice.

There are some real fuckwits on here.

Call the GP op, for your children's sake, if you are doing everything for them, make that the first call you make.

@herecomesthsun No - the way you have listed risk is not correct. The weighted risk would be broken down by age profile. The majority of Covid deaths are 65 years + & the majority have underlying conditions.
If you remove them from the figures and weight the figures properly the risks are not the same.

The total confirmed deaths from Jan to now in the UK was 44, 998 (Not 60K)
That is deaths WITH Covid not exclusively from Covid. Big difference.
More than three quarters (77%) of all those who died WITH covid were aged 75 or over and 43% were aged 85 or over.
91% of Covid deaths WITH covid were with an underlying condition with an average age of 80. (Source ONS)

Given that risk there are then 10,349 deaths below age 59, with underlying conditions , across all of the UK, since March. (All WITH not from Covid)

As a comparative if you look at suicide deaths there have been 2,117 cases from Jan - June in the UK - what will that be by December? 4,000?
So why are we not freaking out about suicide?
Don't present risks the way you have done so it is not factual and unhelpful to the poster.

A 1-2% chance of death is something to be taken very seriously.

Also thousands of people died of other causes but because they had covid at some point that was on the death certificate. My friends' mother died of a hip replacement complication (she was very old) she had recovered from covid a few weeks before caught from her care home - but because she had registered positive three weeks before that was registered as the cause of death.

This has happened alot, so even the stats we can see do not show the whole picture. The average age of death is 82 - most people of that age need to die of something, so for me I just can not understand why people of middle age in reasonably good health are so worried they can't send their children to school. The media have created hysteria, and the fall out from those suffering from poor MH is devastating.

@Friendsoftheearth I agree fully. See my post above. There is risk in everything but the challenge is to stay able to enjoy life.

@Nellodee

A 1-2% chance of death is something to be taken very seriously.

Based on a calculator that we have no idea if it's actually official or not. The only one I've seen is the covid age one and I think that gives high/medium/low risk rather than a %

ijustcantcope if you're still reading, you are not alone. Plenty of parents with 'underlying health conditions' are looking at sending kids back to school in horror. There is no good solution, do what's right for you and know that none of the people calling "child abuse" are in your shoes or are going to be there to help you if the shit hits the fan. Good luck.

@Nellodee For sure. But the risk needs to be realistic.
Odds of dying from heart disease worldwide across all genders is 1 in 6.
By your reasoning thats huge.

Thats 16% - Huge eh? So what do you do every day to lower this huge massive risk from heart disease ? Very little probably like most people.
Why are we not freaking out about Heart disease?

It's still death.
It's still unpleasant.
Its relatively unavoidable

But its not all over the BBC or Social media. All relative. Stay inside and avoid covid but let the stress build up to affect your Mental or Heart health?

You need to send your children back to school.

What children need are their parents. The only thing the OP needs to do is keep well for her children, her parents and for herself.

[quote Jakey056]@herecomesthsun No - the way you have listed risk is not correct. The weighted risk would be broken down by age profile. The majority of Covid deaths are 65 years + & the majority have underlying conditions.
If you remove them from the figures and weight the figures properly the risks are not the same.

The total confirmed deaths from Jan to now in the UK was 44, 998 (Not 60K)
That is deaths WITH Covid not exclusively from Covid. Big difference.
More than three quarters (77%) of all those who died WITH covid were aged 75 or over and 43% were aged 85 or over.
91% of Covid deaths WITH covid were with an underlying condition with an average age of 80. (Source ONS)

Given that risk there are then 10,349 deaths below age 59, with underlying conditions , across all of the UK, since March. (All WITH not from Covid)

As a comparative if you look at suicide deaths there have been 2,117 cases from Jan - June in the UK - what will that be by December? 4,000?
So why are we not freaking out about suicide?
Don't present risks the way you have done so it is not factual and unhelpful to the poster.[/quote]
I think the way I described it makes more sense than a vague and inaccurate comparison with RTA deaths, which is never itself properly weighted or put in context.

There is a 1 in 20,000 approx lifetime risk of death from a RTA, whereas for people with vulnerabilities the risk from covid can be much higher, even if they are, say, under 60 .

n 2019, the suicide rate in England was 10.8 deaths per 100,000 population (5,316 deaths), which is of course very sad. I hadn't seen your figure before. The suicide rate remains sadly high but it is very good that fewer people may have killed themselves this spring. (I would, however, remain concerned about the winter, and the effect of our inadequate covid management on people's mental health and wellbeing, in various ways).

"The number of people killed by coronavirus in the UK passed 60,000 on Tuesday " - given here as 61,469.

"Of the full death toll, 59,927 deaths were recorded across the UK’s statistical agencies and includes all deaths where Covid was recorded on the death certificate. The rest are deaths which occurred subsequently which are sourced from the government’s data dashboard. These include deaths which occurred within 28 days of a positive Covid death."

I think if you want to further discuss figures the best place would be the data thread, rather than one about anxiety, really, for various reasons.

What children need are their parents. The only thing the OP needs to do is keep well for her children, her parents and for herself. If the OP feels the way to do this is to keep her children home from school, that is what she should do.
She won’t be much good to them if she ends up in ICU will she? It is ridiculous to say that will only happen to 1-2% of people. Nobody knows how their bodies will react if they get it. Even talking about percentages is ridiculous, the figures are practically fabricated. We are nowhere near on top of this virus.

[quote Jakey056]@Nellodee For sure. But the risk needs to be realistic.
Odds of dying from heart disease worldwide across all genders is 1 in 6.
By your reasoning thats huge.

Thats 16% - Huge eh? So what do you do every day to lower this huge massive risk from heart disease ? Very little probably like most people.
Why are we not freaking out about Heart disease?

It's still death.
It's still unpleasant.
Its relatively unavoidable

But its not all over the BBC or Social media. All relative. Stay inside and avoid covid but let the stress build up to affect your Mental or Heart health?[/quote]
Actually, heart disease is one of those things that we can do an awful lot to avoid... Poor diet alone is responsible for 30% of the risk.

oh and OP, it can be very upsetting exposing yourself to this sort of discussion (which I am sure you only did because you were really keen to do the right thing for your children xx )

People do not get heart disease from just standing beside another person.
Assessing risk using such examples is completely off topic.

But you can make an informed decision.

You can look at actual statistics, ignore scaremongering in the news.

But yes, like PP said, I think you're depriving your children and you're at a real risk of projecting your (unnecessary) fears onto them.

@VortexofBloggery

ijustcantcope if you're still reading, you are not alone. Plenty of parents with 'underlying health conditions' are looking at sending kids back to school in horror. There is no good solution, do what's right for you and know that none of the people calling "child abuse" are in your shoes or are going to be there to help you if the shit hits the fan. Good luck.

This is a great post.