A child is lethargic, tired, doesn’t want anything… But can children get tired and burn out? It turns out that they really can. How to understand in time that the child needs a restart and apostrophe after s, and how to help?

Is he really tired?
One mom asks: “I feel like my child is tired, but I don’t know how to assess it? I just feel like he is. Lots of activities, end of the year, something needs to go away, but I don’t know what, he seems to like everything, well or not like it, but no way to quit, helpful. Could you assess if it’s that bad or can we leave it alone?”
It can be hard to assess at a glance how overwhelmed, exhausted, and burned out your child is. Yes, yes, kids can burn out too – use up their resources for learning and life and kinesthetic learning, lose motivation because they’re simply tired. And trying to push them or scold them only makes the situation worse. At first, these signs can be hard to see. It may take weeks or months before you notice a change in your child’s behavior. But knowing these signs of overload can help protect children from exhaustion.

It’s especially important to watch for signs of exhaustion in children who seem to really love learning, so they happily sign up for every possible club, studio, and section, which parents, of course, are very happy about. They work hard, acquire new knowledge and skills, but often face an unexpected loss of motivation or global failure after major achievements. These are successful children who may have a serious disadvantage: they do not know how to relax, rest and recuperate. By the way, it is not at all necessary to lie in bed to recover. Many recover through play, but adults rarely consider play a useful activity, especially if lessons are not learned.

You should also be careful with those children who have physical or mental health problems or https://argoprep.com/blog/k8/adjectives-starting-with-i-760-words-to-boost-your-vocabulary/. They are more likely to face more obstacles and setbacks than their peers. Their experience of constantly overcoming difficulties more quickly turns into overload and leads to burnout at school and even in kindergarten. And when that happens, it can stifle the motivation that helps them work to improve.

How do you know if a child already needs help?
1. Negativism. “I don’t want it! I don’t need this at all! All math is terrible!” – Fatigue can drastically reduce a child’s motivation to do homework, learn new things, or adapt to a changed environment. Your child’s positive attitude has disappeared. You often hear him say, “What’s the point?” Activities he used to enjoy are now considered unappealing.

2. Procrastination. It used to be that your child was ready to start studying right away, without “swaying.” Now you should make some reminders, and he will complain for a long time, to slow down, to avoid and to invent excuses.

3. apathy. It seems that the child has nothing to tell you. Previously, when you asked, “How was gym class today?”, he would describe in detail the entire lesson, but now he just shrugs and says, “Well, okay.

4. Avoidance. For several months, the child enjoyed participating in a virtual balalaika group. And now he comes up with excuses not to go there: the Internet broke, the webinar didn’t turn on, forgot, overslept.

5. Anxiety or fear. Maybe before school was perceived by the child without much enthusiasm. But now the anxiety became so strong that he cries almost every night, or often vomits unexpectedly in the morning or has severe stomach pain, but doctors throw up their hands.

6. Concentration problems: your child can concentrate only for 10 minutes – and then gets distracted. He used to be able to last twice as long.

7. Irritability: the child feels that everything around him is wrong, wrong, many things make him angry or depressed, or you have noticed that he is upset by little things that in the past he did not pay attention to at all.

8. Difficult choices. “I don’t know if I want ice cream or brownie, but I don’t want the two together either.”
If you notice these signs, or if you feel that things seem to be going the same way, but generally worse than usual (although there are no objective reasons for this) – it’s time to figure out what’s going on with the child. Ask what emotions he is experiencing. Explain what overload or even burnout are, how they affect well-being and self-confidence. Talking about how your child feels is an important first step to reducing burnout.

Think together about what it might be and work out ways to recover together. This could be an unscheduled vacation, some joyful activities, playing together, or even a drastic change in schedule – if minimal half measures don’t work, and the child lacks the mental capacity and time to reset. By the way, this also works with adults. Only to the additional signs of burnout you should add the use of psychoactive substances in larger quantities (smoking, alcohol, etc.) or other ways to freeze your feelings a bit.

Try not to compare your child or yourself with others, with those who are always cheerful, attend five circles and study with excellence: we all have different nervous systems and different life circumstances, different inner resources, to which you should treat quite sparingly, recharging the inner batteries in time.