‘It will be alright’: Kansas City kids talk about how they cope with the pandemic
The coronavirus has been creeping into Aaron McIntosh’s dreams.
One night, the Lee’s Summit 11-year-old dreamed the virus took over everyone in the world.
When he awoke, the Cedar Creek Elementary School fifth grader took some deep breaths and reminded himself that it was just a dream.
Neither Aaron nor his family members have COVID-19, which Aaron described as “a dangerous sickness that takes a lot of energy out of you.”
But once, Aaron overheard his dad talking about it on the phone. Someone he knew had “caught a case” and had to go to the hospital.
“I was like, that’s kind of close to us, so just be on the lookout and be sure to wash my hands,” Aaron said.
Aaron was one of more than a dozen Kansas City area children interviewed by The Star about their hopes and fears in the midst of a pandemic that is reshaping their childhoods.
A junior high school boy is an aspiring TikTok star. One fourth grader makes her own newscasts to keep in touch with family. A young ballerina is confined to practicing in the living room, and another teen made her closet a getaway destination.
Many miss their friends and fear for their grandparents. They’ve found new ways to stay busy as extracurricular activities came to a screeching halt.
Each has hopes for a future beyond the present crisis.
Luis Pecina
Luis Pecina’s brother-in-law’s grandfather died of COVID-19 in Spain earlier this year. That was the first person the 13-year-old knew to die from the disease.
“If I have kids in the future, I would just be like wow, I’m glad you guys haven’t had to go through this,” Luis said. “It’s like a really hard time for people and we have to wear masks mostly everywhere we go and wear gloves. It’s the part I don’t like.”
He worries about his grandparents, who also live in Kansas City.
“I love them a lot and I just don’t want to lose them,” he said. He misses hugging them. Now he resorts to elbow taps.
“Hi Grandpa, I love you,’” Luis demonstrated, sticking out his folded arm.
But this new life amid the fears of disease isn’t all fear. The eighth grader at Kansas City’s Foreign Language Academy also fills his new schedule with music.
He wants to emerge from self-isolation as a TikTok star.
Luis has 903 followers on the video-sharing platform. His goal is to reach at least 1,000.
He had a TikTok before the stay at home order, but now he has more time to be creative. A recent video features his father and sister remaking an old family photo to the tune of Simple Plan’s “I’m Just a Kid.”
It’s too loud to practice his trumpet with everyone home, so Luis picked up the guitar again. He’s trying to learn songs by Ritchie Valens and the Beatles.
“I just want to be known around the world,” said Luis, who dreams of one day being an actor, pro soccer player and geologist. “I don’t know why, I just want to.”
Lillian Hosty
Before starting her online schoolwork each morning, Lillian Hosty anchors a newscast from her Brookside home. The 10-year-old’s four viewers are all family.
Lillian, a fourth grader at St. Paul’s Episcopal Day School, was inspired by a teacher. She announces the local weather and reads stories she finds on kids news sites.
On a recent show, she performed a magic trick she said was “so bad it was funny.” She made herself disappear by hitting pause on the video frame she was in, ducking out, then hitting record again.
Her mom, Whitney Hosty, said the newscast, which sometimes features Lillian’s 7-year-old brother, Henry, helps the rest of the family keep track of the day of the week.
She joked that her daughter, who also created a website and blog, is spending quarantine building a media empire.
Lillian even made an online catalog for her at-home library so her parents can check out books.
“I think it definitely is somehow bringing more people together,” Lillian said of the effort to combat COVID-19. “It sounds weird because we’re, I don’t know … People are definitely being more kinder online.”
Experts weigh in
Before COVID-19, kids had structured social relationships, opportunities to manage complex feelings around peers and extracurricular activities that helped them discover their sense of self.
Now, they’re navigating major disruptions to their routines, said Jordan Booker, an associate professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri.
Will they be able to recover?
“By and large, young folks are a little bit hardier than we sometimes think,” Booker said. “I think they’re going to be able to cover a lot of that lost ground pretty well in the coming years.”
Nicole Campione-Barr, a colleague of Booker’s at the university, is concerned about the lack of peer interactions children are experiencing now. Her biggest advice to parents as society slowly begins to regain a semblance of normalcy is to take it slow.
“It might take some kids a little while to readjust back to being around friends or family members,’” she said. “They might have residual worries about whether or not this is OK to do this since we’ve been sort of clustered at home for so long.”
Harper Best
Harper Best began ballet when she was three.
Now 12, she’s transformed her living room into a dance studio.
Harper, a sixth grader at the Kansas City Ballet School, was set to compete in the Youth America Grand Prix, a national dance competition, in New York City in April. Then it was called off and her ballet school closed its doors to in-person classes.
“It’s very unclear where we’ll stand next year with our training,” Harper said, worried about falling behind. “It’s a bit depressing.”
It’s normal to feel anxiety at this time, one of her teachers told her over an online class.
“On days when I’m feeling kind of upset and a bit down and unsure, it’s hard to focus and dance,” Harper said. “Usually I just want to go back to sleep.”
She now finds herself practicing in a nook of her Kansas City home, guided by teachers over Zoom.
“It’s pretty different,” Harper said, giving a tour of her practice space over Zoom. “I have like half the room I usually have.”
The hours in her practice schedule are greatly reduced for now. Concerned that students could injure themselves doing jumps at home, Harper’s teachers are focusing more on strengthening and stretching.
She likes to take breaks to play with her brother, Simon, who is 7. They have a rope swing in the backyard and watch movies at night.
“It’s always like yes, this is hard, but we know it will end at some point,” Harper said.
She is reading and writing more stories now. She also started photographing her dolls, an interest her parents encouraged when dance started to slow down.
“Maybe we can learn that sometimes it’s good to take a step back,” Harper said. “My generation has kind of just been hooked on electronics all of our lives. It’s good to take a step back and see the world not just online.”
Hazel and Georgia Graves
For 11-year-old Georgia Graves, living through a pandemic can feel claustrophobic.
“I felt basically sort of like I was a zoo animal even though I have all this space,” said Georgia, a fifth grader at Pleasant Lea Elementary in Lee’s Summit. “I just feel enclosed and kind of like, stuck.”
The boring days are often the bad days, so she tries to keep busy.
“I’ll take a walk, I’ll skateboard, do art or anything that I can just forget that this is happening and kind of feel like everything is normal,” she said.
With the help of her older sister, Hazel, Georgia started her own YouTube channel in April. Every Wednesday she posts art tutorials or do-it-yourself projects. She hoped it would make other people happy, too.
Hazel, 13, said she’s learned she’s “not an art person” and that sometimes she needs time alone.
When the seventh grader from Pleasant Lea Middle School is feeling stressed, she likes to sit in her closet. Wrapped up in her fuzzy blanket, Hazel practices makeup and listens to podcasts to take her mind off the news. She’s been tuning in to Love it or Leave it and Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls.
“It’s just like a nice quiet space where I can get away from everyone,” she said.
She misses shopping and having sleepovers with friends. But Hazel said there’s some good that’s come of the pandemic: People are more compassionate. It’s sort of like Christmas.
“Everyone’s really giving and understanding and that’s kind of what it feels like right now,” Hazel said.
Alexis, Aaron and Isaac McIntosh
Alexis McIntosh is confident.
“I’m not worried about the coronavirus because as long as we are social distancing it will be alright,” said the 7-year-old sister of Aaron, the boy who had dreams about the coronavirus.
Asked how social distancing is going, the Cedar Creek Elementary student replied: “Terrible.”
“It’s really bad because we all want to high-five and hug and do things together where we’re really close, but we can’t do that,” Alexis said.
“You don’t get to play with your friends as much,” she added. “You’re really just focused on one thing, and that’s the coronavirus and trying not to get sick.”
To make up for the lack of social interaction, the McIntosh family has been playing a lot of games. Scrabble. 5 Second Rule. Uno. The games consume the evening hours in their Lee’s Summit home.
During a recent Zoom video meeting with her class, Alexis’s teacher asked each student about their goals for the day. Alexis wanted to be nicer to her older brothers, 13-year-old Isaac and Aaron, who said social isolation has given him time to reflect.
“I’ve learned about myself that I’m a little more, what’s the word, I’m not as much patient as I wish I am, but you know, that’s OK. I can fix that,” said Aaron.
For Isaac, the time at home is an opportunity to become more independent while his parents are both working. He’s learned to do laundry and make lunch, helping to teach his brother and sister to do the same.
“Usually I would just always depend on my mom or my dad to do a lot of this stuff, but now I’m starting to learn how to do stuff on my own and kind of follow what they’re doing,” Isaac said.
The seventh grader at Pleasant Lea Middle School sees COVID-19 as a teaching opportunity for the world as he himself learns to both be more helpful and better prepare for the future.
His advice for the moment? Always keep high hopes.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the names of two schools in Lee’s Summit. The schools are Pleasant Lea Middle School and Pleasant Lea Elementary.
This story was originally published May 17, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
