During
Covid-19, it can be hard to know if you’re doing the right thing for both your
child and yourself. Emily Flake, a self-described Gen-X mom, understands,
and has some insight.
She
writes: “Some rule loosening is an inevitable consequence of constricted mental
bandwidth. Many of us just don’t have the energy to insist on the completion of
every single online assignment across a multitude of goofily-named platforms,
or to shepherd a child into making her bed every day.”
No
guidebook or advice column covers pandemic parenting, so best to commiserate
and compare notes with others. It soon becomes clear that, with so much of the world
turned upside down, all parents have necessarily altered whatever style they’ve
chosen, and everyone is wondering which impulses to honor for the good of all.
“Instead
of a good and bad angel on my shoulders, I have warring parenting
philosophies,” Flake writes. “This was true even before Covid-19, but is
particularly exacerbated by the pandemic. On one shoulder sits a mother who
says children ought to be treated extra gently now, because the continuing
psychic fallout of school closures, truncated social lives and a silent viral
menace are huge. The mom on the other shoulder tells me to suck it up and stop
letting my kid be such a baby. I think this mom smokes?”
READ MORE: Mindfulness for better parenting
Flake mainly
worries she’s letting things slide too much – with both her eight-year-old daughter
and herself. And her daughter’s recent reactions to discipline – “an adolescent
tang to her back-talk and a toddler-like regression in the way she gets upset”
– concern her even more. Her Texan cousin sagely and simply advises:
“backsliding is the devil.” Flake tries to keep it to a minimum, accepting that
some is OK, as she’s finding what the limits are.
Like a lot
of parents I know, Flake can’t really look to her own growing up for cues.
(Frankly, because Covid-19 is ours and ours alone, nobody can.) Not only was
there obviously no pandemic, but also, her parents’ style was disengaged and
inconsistent. And while so much about pandemic parenting is uncertain, she
knows those tactics are to be avoided. “Disengaged” is actually not even really
possible.
Flake is
wise to look to herself: “ …the most important thing to remember here is that
whatever leeway I give my daughter is a lesson I need to learn for myself
first.
There’s an
art to being gentle with yourself and with others in a way that doesn’t cancel
out the idea of expectations and responsibilities.”
Like all
of us, she hopes to finally strike that balance by the time a vaccine arrives.
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