"My daughter can barely remember what life was like before Covid."

Roberta's* Story

This week only (8th-15th June 2021), all donations to Hestia are doubled, and will help us to provide activities over the summer for children living in our domestic abuse refuges. After a year of uncertainty, help us to give children the summer they deserve. 

Double my donation

I’ve been at Hestia’s domestic abuse refuge with my four-year-old daughter for two months now and a lot of that has been during lockdown. It’s been difficult. 

My daughter is very adventurous and likes exploring, so being stuck in the house has been hard. For a while, she wasn’t able to play with other children in the park or things like that. She’s frustrated by it; she keeps asking why everything is closed and why we can’t do much. 

I try and keep her occupied, but she gets bored of doing the same things in the refuge. Before the lockdown and us having to move, she was attending nursery, and now she’s not. It’s affected her confidence as she is less willing to approach other children and play now. She is a lot clingier to me too. 

We recently started having weekly activity groups at the refuge, like arts and crafts and flower planting. Whenever my daughter sees the activities coordinator, she gets super excited. I can see she is benefiting from it. It gives her an opportunity play with other children at the refuge. Sometimes she asks, “what if the other children don’t like me?” and I have to reassure her.

She has a way to go to get her confidence back, but the activities are helping. 

I’m really excited about the idea of having more activities over the summer holidays. It will give me something to do with her and something to look forward to. Before we came to the refuge, we didn’t get to go out a lot and as she is only four, she can barely remember what it was like to go out and do things before Covid hit. 

I hope we are able to do anything that involves sports as she’s very active! I would also like to take her somewhere educational, like the Natural History Museum. Those are things I did as a child, and things that any child should get to experience. 

I think the chance to do more activities as everything starts to open again will be the boost that she needs. 

Double my donation

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