Hello, I'm Nula McGovern and we're bringing you BBC OS, conversations about coronavirus here on the BBC World Service.

As the pandemic continues to disrupt lives, psychologists from Canada, Sweden and the United States discuss how the coronavirus has affected the mental health of children.

I think that for many children there has been an extreme sense of loss, you know, loss of safety,

loss of normalcy, and in some case loss of lives, loss of family, loss of jobs and there will be trauma associated with that for many kids. Education is a crucial part of our lives and for millions of children and young adults around

the world, this year has seen schools and universities closed, resulting in the disruption of classes and learning

and adding considerable stress, not just to children, but also to parents.

And today we've brought together two mothers, Unati in Cape Town, South Africa and

Jamie in Cincinnati in the US who both of a child with special educational needs.

They're also joined by Sophia, a teacher at a special education high school in Jerusalem, Israel.

Our conversation began with Jamie telling me about her son.

His name is Cole.

He's seven years old. We thought he could have had autism, but we had him test it this past year and it's ADHD. He has a lot of quirks that you would see from an autistic kid like he

won't look at you in the eyes. You have to say his name multiple times to get his

attention. His attention spans just very short. In school he has multiple

therapists, two aides. He has a lot of help that he's not getting right now at home

or when we were doing online services through the school.

Yeah, that must have been tough. How do you think that affected Cole?

A lot. He's used to his routine, waking up, the bus like every little thing he was used to he loved to do just to see his friends and everything to go this long without that and then we can't really go anywhere and do anything.

He's just bouncing off the walls. We've tried to do our own therapy and he has three younger siblings.

That distracts him as well. he just wants to go play and when you say he's

bouncing off the walls I think a lot of parents will know exactly what that means how does that

manifest itself he'll just start complaining that he's bored. He wants to go do something. Can we go to the park or amusement park? He'll literally start just jumping around on things too. So literally

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