Excer[ts from an essay by Chloe I. Cooney published on Medium.
“Are we permanently ruining and psychologically damaging him?”
This was an actual conversation my wife and I had Friday morning. I had just gotten off a work call and my brain was ticking through follow up items adding to a long list of untouched to dos. I’d found my wife multi-tasking an onslaught of incoming work questions she was fielding during her “homeschool” time — in which our son refused to partake. Instead, he huddled in an increasingly secure fort, refusing to do anything (color, read, go outside, talk to his teacher, etc…) besides sit in silence in the dark or watch his ipad. (He sat in silence in the dark).
We both felt guilty for the work we were not doing — and aching for the way our son was struggling and needed us to be present and calm and just with him. Exactly what our current schedule running back and forth between work calls, requests and parenting — not to mention life in a pandemic — prohibited. (Later, as I took over the homeschool shift and he stormed upstairs to cry, he told me it was because I had stopped smiling at him. Knife, meet heart.)
This is really hard.
What’s amazing to me is how consistent this struggle is among every parent I talk to. The texts and social media posts bouncing around my circle all echo each other. We feel like we’re failing at both. Our kids don’t just need us — they need more of us. Our kids are acting out, abandoning the routines they already had, dropping naps, sleeping less, doing less — except for jumping on top of their parents, which is happening much more. We’re letting them watch far greater amounts of screen time than we ever thought we’d tolerate. Forget homeschooling success — most of us are struggling to get our kids to do the basics that would have accounted for a saturday morning routine before this pandemic.
Which is not to say people are not trying to do better. My inbox, social media feeds and countertops are *filled* with creative ideas for educating and caring for your kids. Workbooks, games, creative projects and experiments, virtual yoga, virtual doodling, virtual zoo visits, virtual everything.
I honestly am too tired and stretched thin to read the suggestions, let alone try them. The few I have tried have been met with astounding and fierce rejection by my son.
Read the rest of this essay by Chloe I. Cooney published on Medium can be found here.
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