Pediatric Psychologist Creates Animated Video to Help Families Cope With COVID-19 Pandemic

In this scene from “The Martin Family Dinner,” family members talk about the ways COVID-19 changed everyday life.

When COVID-19 arrived, stress and anxiety were common reactions for children and the adults who care for them. Knowing they would need some tools to cope with a global pandemic, an OU Health pediatric psychologist created an animated video that models healthy communication during an uncertain time.

In some ways, the work is not unlike what Noel Jacobs, Ph.D., does day to day with patients and families in the Pediatric Gastroenterology Clinic – helping them to understand, talk about and navigate life amid the uncertainty of sickness. With COVID-19, he inserted those same skills inside the story and dialogue of a family coming to terms with the upheaval of the virus. The result is the animated video “The Martin Family Dinner,” which is designed to help children understand issues related to the pandemic and to help parents have supportive conversations with their children.

“In my work, and the work of all pediatric psychologists at OU Health, the most important goal we have is for kids to grow up healthy and empowered, and to give them tools for coping during the rough parts. In a sense, this animated video encapsulates that goal – for kids and families to get through

life feeling supported and feeling like they not only have a way to cope today, but also to have a good tomorrow,” said Jacobs, an associate professor in the Section of General and Community Pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics. In “The Martin Family Dinner,” one of the parents is a physician who cares for patients with COVID-19; the other parent is at home with their three children. To keep the entire family safe, the physician parent is staying apart and communicating virtually. The first part of the video focuses on information about the virus and hearing the kids’ questions and worries. The second half delves into family communication and coping, while normalizing the emotional and social toll of the pandemic. The idea for the video sprang from conversations in the College of Medicine’s Collegiality and Well-Being Committee. Jacobs developed the characters and wrote the script, and colleagues gave their feedback. Two recent OU graduates helped with the animation, and Green Pastures Studio in Oklahoma City hired voice actors, provided editing and helped with other details. The video has spread around the internet since it was released, and the American Psychological Association featured it in its Monitor on Psychology publication. As the pandemic continued, children faced stressors far beyond the virus itself, Jacobs said. When schools shut down, children suddenly lost connection with the peers they’d been accustomed to seeing in person for nine months out of the year. Many parents experienced job loss and financial problems, leading to anxiety that their children absorbed.

“Adaptation is hard for everybody,” Jacobs said. “Sleep disturbance has been pretty common for kids, as well as changes in eating habits. Our habits are habits partly because our days tend to be similar in normal times. So when that changes, a lot of our habits change as well.” The videos also address the fact that parents, too, have felt the emotional burden of COVID-19 and struggled for words to help their children process what was happening.

Noel Jacobs, Ph.D.

“Just like adults did not easily have conversations with their co-workers and friends at first, families didn’t have many words to talk about this and to help kids express their feelings, or to plan what steps they would take as a family,” Jacobs said. However, there have been silver linings for youth and families, he said. Children who experienced social anxiety or bullying at school received a reprieve. Teenagers often slept longer and better, and many families improved their eating habits because they were spending more time at home.

The animated videos have been so successful that Jacobs is planning to make more. He will again use the Martin family, but the next videos will focus on support and quality of life for kids with chronic health conditions. The topic is a perfect fit for his daily clinical work with OU Health Physicians and at Oklahoma Children’s Hospital, where he works with young patients who have ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease and liver disease, including seeing kids through the transplant process. He also helps adolescents prepare for independent medical self-management as they move toward adult medical care.

Young people with chronic conditions have a higher likelihood of needing emergency care for events that could have been prevented, he said, and much of that is related to the handover of medical management from parent to child.

“We can provide these videos to new patients and families to help them realize that even though they’re new to the experience, many other families are going through it,” he said. “I’m excited to be using the format of animation to deliver information that is medically accurate and psychologically informed, with modeling of how families can support each other, whether it concerns a newly diagnosed health condition or a pandemic that all of us are facing.”