COVID-19 has been a disaster for basically everyone across the world. From the economic shutdowns to schools closing, to people losing their jobs and livelihoods, it hasn’t been an easy year. Mental health has been in crisis since the world has had to suffer from COVID-19. Stress, anxiety, anger, and even depression has been on the rise across the world as a result of the larger-than-life-stresses that COVID has brought on.
But it’s not just parents who are struggling with the stresses due to COVID-19. Kids, too, have been stressing out. But one UK-based project has helped kids put their feelings about COVID-19 into drawings and the results? They’re hilarious.
Great Bean Bags, a for-profit company that sells, well, you guessed it, bean bags, started a project that might have helped kids across the island country across the pond to unwind — and laugh. The company published an open call asking kids to send in drawings of what they thought COVID-19, the virus, looked like for kids across the United Kingdom.
Great Bean Bags
“We wanted to see the world through a child’s eyes and in particular how they view COVID-19. Does it seem like a big scary entity that they don’t really understand, a horrible little monster, or is it the opposite?” the presser reads. And the drawings that kids sent in across the UK are great. They nearly deserve to be exhibited in a museum for these strange, scary, and sometimes funny times.
Great Bean Bags
Finley, a 3-and-a-half-year-old, simply sent in a ball of orange scribbles. One kid sent what appears to be stick figures being abducted by an alien spaceship — another drew a three-eyed creature with two legs and a curly-cue tale, breathing out lime green hot gas. 3-year-old Matilda drew what appears to be a red and white slug, and some child-artists went full abstract artist, with one budding Picasso named Alfie sending in a series of squiggles that feel more like a meditation on modern living than anything else.
Great Bean Bags
But while the results are funny, they’re also a great representation of how parents can use art and play to help kids express themselves. Sometimes children, especially young ones, struggle to find the words for the stress that they are coping with — and it’s impossible to shield kids completely from COVID-19, as it’s changed everyone’s lives, not just the lives of parents and adults. Pulling out a box of crayons and belittling COVID-19 to a series of orange squiggles does seem like an appropriate therapy.
Great Bean Bags
