Coronavirus: Panicking over virus isn't what kids need

Wonder what this generation of kids is going to be called?

You know, the kids who are being dipped in hand sanitiser as though it were a flea bath and they're infected mongrels.

The kids who get school off for pandemic days, rather than snow days.

The kids whose parents stockpile face masks, canned goods and toilet paper. Who cancel soccer practice for fear of the novel coronavirus.

The kids who are watching the planet warm while the guy in the White House denies it.

The kids who are doing drills at school where they learn to muster at their huddle stations and stay silent as a pretend killer rattles and bangs on the locked door, acting as if he is coming to slaughter them.

Demographers have dubbed those born between 1997 and 2012 as Generation Z. But I have a better suggestion: Gen World War Z - the Preppers.

"World War Z" is the 2006 best-selling zombie novel by Max Brooks, son of Mel Brooks, that was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt, as well as a heart-pounding video game.

The storyline of the novel coronavirus could have come from a dystopian novel. Photo / AP

The movie, which featured a store-looting scene that looked eerily similar to what I experienced on my weekly shopping run last week, was pure Hollywood. But the book is the masterpiece of the zombie genre that delves into the breakdown of a social and political structure during a pandemic. China banned it.

"In my zombie apocalypse novel, cases of a mysterious new disease start showing up somewhere in China," Brooks wrote in the Washington Post last month. "The government responds by suppressing news of the infection, threatening several doctors who try to sound the alarm. That coverup allows the virus to spread throughout the country, and then beyond its borders to the rest of the world."

Sound familiar?

This isn't just a novel, this is childhood for our kids. We're raising a generation of anxious preppers. They're more Greta Thunberg than Hannah Montana. They absolutely suffer from eco-anxiety, a very real fear about climate change.

"Why should I study for a future I won't have?" read the sign of one young protester at a recent rally in Denver.

I minimised the impact active-shooter drills would have on my 13-year-old. But then he wrote a song last year that shook me to my core about the drills:

"My parents got the three R's in school: reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic. They had fun.

"Us? We got a fourth R. Run. Run from a gun."

Increasingly, schools are learning that active-shooter drills are traumatising and frightening to children.

We played Pong or Ms. Pac-Man after riding our bikes around the dirt lot and buying Jolly Ranchers at the 7-Eleven.

In their world, they can earn a varsity letter at school for playing esports that are basically apocalypse training manoeuvres. We built pillow forts; they simulate survival training in Fortnite.

Young people are being affected by the growing coronavirus panic. Photo / AP

And what about all the pandemic panic?

"I didn't realise how worried he is about all this," my husband told me over the weekend, after he and our 15-year-old son rode home from an event and had a long talk about the coronavirus, which is threatening to shut down classes as well as a class trip overseas this summer for which he's been saving.

We keep telling the kids to wash their hands and understand that even if they are infected with Covid-19, it's not a death sentence.

Heck, given the state of their bedrooms and the hockey locker rooms they do really gross things in, they should be superinoculated and fine.

"But what about the grandparents? And my older teachers?" my son fretted.

Another dad I talked to said his son's entire session with a therapist last week was dedicated to the kid's fears about the virus.

"I worry what this is doing to them," he said.

Me too.

We can start shaping them and their generation right now, with the way we react to this.

Children don't need to feel panic over the spread of Covid-19. Photo / AP

Rather than panic buying supplies that others need - the face masks that keep health-care and construction workers healthy - we simmer the heck down. Go ahead and buy more canned goods, if that feels right. Buy a few extra things in case you get trapped at home in quarantine. Shop like you have two teenage boys at home - that'll last a teen-free family for two weeks.

But it's also a great opportunity to instil some solid values in those kids: resilience, reason, grit and altruism.

Don't cancel all your plans, don't give in to misinformation and hysteria, check in on the grandparents, the elderly, the vulnerable. Make plans to stay in touch with friends in case anyone goes into quarantine, create a meal train for anyone shut in. Eat at Chinese restaurants - they're hurting. (And so far, my boys have labelled this effort their favourite form of activism.)

This doesn't have to be a disaster. It can be an opportunity to make Gen Z a newer Greatest Generation. If we show them how.