Springtide is excited to share this intimate, wide-ranging, and thoughtful conversation between two siblings, Seher and Spencer, discussing life during the pandemic.  

In this video, pediatric chaplain and Springtide Research Advisory Board member Seher Siddiqee sits down with her younger sibling, 14-year-old Spencer, to discuss lessons and challenges from the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic. As school settings, identities, and relationships shift, Spencer describes the ways they are figuring out what “normal” might look like amid totally new circumstances.  

Building on the themes presented in our 2021 guide The New Normal: 8 Ways to Care for Gen Z in a Post-Pandemic World, their conversation offers an inside peek into how young people have been navigating this period and even uses different exercises in empathy that we feature in The New Normal.  

We encourage you to reach out to one or two young people in your life and invite them to share and converse about the themes of The New Normal. We often hear from the young people who are featured in or who read our data: I never had anyone ask me this before. Change that narrative, and invite the young people in your life to tell their stories and share what and how they’re processing—especially how they’re processing something as big and unwieldy as a pandemic that’s impacted years of their adolescence and young adulthood already.