Jesus I wish my kids would go off to summer camp for a few months. They are what’s making this most unbearable for me.
They also lost ice cream stores, toy stores, cinemas, etc if they were doing that as well.
They don’t have any control. Their natural instinct is to continue to play if they can and push the boundaries if they can. And when kids get depressed they often act out more paradoxically.
This leads to chaos if you’re also trying to work from home.
I feel for my kids. So I don’t apologize to others if they intrude on my work; they are people too and going through the crisis too. But yes it is extremely stressful some portion of every day.
I try myself to not blame them or myself for putting up with the situation, because that leads to frustration and anger and more stress; my wife and I are trying to create more and more capability in my home for the kids to self-entertain every day. We have a new daily structure. Goal charts. School time. Online learning games. Outdoor time. Messenger kids. Etc.
It’s not painless. My wife and I are taking shifts during daylight hours so I work well past midnight every night to catch up. That also is impacting my ability to stay positive.
But every day is a new day. Good luck and don’t be hard on yourself.
The other day one of them said they can't wait for summer break. I asked what would be different and they said 'no school work', haha. They have about 60 minutes per day of remote learning to do. Apparently more of this would be okay.
I thought they'd miss socializing a lot more than they do so far. Instead being trapped at home with dad is similar to vacation.
I surprise myself taking breaks to drink tea and play with her (puzzles, reading, having her read, do some short yoga, sometimes even dancing with her a bit).
It has brought my kids and I far far closer.
Taking care of kids for the day while parents are busy working is one of the many key functions of modern education institutions, and they're not fulfilling that function right now - this gap needs to be filled somehow, and it's not an easy gap to fill without major changes of how millions of people work. E.g. going back to a situation where one spouse is a dedicated housekeeper and is pretty much forced not to work is technically a solution but I'm not sure if we as a society really want to go there. And the usual alternative solutions e.g. using extended family/grandparents for childcare, or cooperating/sharing childcare in a community tend to be explicitly prohibited by the social distancing measures.
It can be the parents only if we expect the parents (at least one parent in every family) not to work, which would require an immense reversal in our social structure. Something like 25% of families are single-parent families, do we expect all these people to quit their jobs in order to raise kids?
To put it bluntly, if the alternative is to put women back in the role of 'Kinder Kuche Kirche' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder,_K%C3%BCche,_Kirche) then it justifies declaring that "warehousing kids" should be one of the key functions of educational institutions; simply because it's an important function that needs to be done by someone other than the working parent(s) and they can fulfil that function reasonably well. Sure, education should be a priority, but IMHO it's better for everyone involved if we explicitly acknowledge all the various valuable functions what our society needs (and gets!) from schools instead of falsely pretending that it's only the education.
Or do you have in mind some other option that removes this role from the educational institutions while still allowing the parent(s) to go on full time employment?
Self isolation is pretty easy if you're single or with a partner with no kids, in an adequately sized home where there is enough space not to feel cramped, and with a garden. If one or more of these things is lacking, it gets ever harder and harder the longer the lockdowns are in place.
Single folks without children have no gauge on reality during a lockdown, especially if they still have jobs and are working from home.
Much like global supply chains, our decisions are optimized quite tightly to our individual lifestyles; what worked well in normal times suddenly doesn't when lifestyles are forced to change.
For the record:
- lots of people make decisions they later regret. Sometimes they make these based on assumptions that later turn out to be incorrect, sometimes on incomplete information, sometimes based on stress or strong emotion, sometimes in line with advice, and sometimes against advice. Sometimes the effects are small, sometimes they are large, sometimes they ought not be regretted.
- some people have children without planning to beforehand (for various reasons)
- most people can’t take extreme worst case scenarios into account when making big life decisions (eg “If I become unemployed or unable to work in 5 years I wouldn’t be able to afford any mortgage therefore I shouldn’t buy a house”)
- some people are constrained by other factors (eg “I’d like to have more space but I can’t afford a larger house which is sufficiently close to my work”)
- It’s reasonably natural for people to want to have children and sometimes they this even if they know it will be hard.