What I Learned About Children and Parenting In A Pandemic Summer

What Happens When There’s “Nothing” To Do

As the reality of a 100% remote school year looms for my three elementary school-aged kids (including a wily, wiggly 1st grader), I want to run screaming to . . . well, there’s nowhere to go. We are stuck. I can’t create the vaccine. I can’t tell all the mask-less people to stop congregating. I can’t replace government leaders. I can’t stop the School Board from sending me anxiety-inducing emails on the regular (I know they have an impossible job and I do not envy them, but so many emails). What I can do, because there’s really nothing else to do, is hope for the best.

In the likely doom and gloom of the next several months trapped all together at home again as the weather becomes less friendly and the Zoom time multiplies, what gives me hope is what happened over the pandemic summer. I dreaded it, and ended up with a few pleasant surprises about my children’s capacity to be functional human beings, needing much less from their parents who were totally burned out from the pandemic spring.

Little Minimalists: They really don’t need a lot to do

Our family has always erred on the side of minimalism when it comes to planned activities (see What Extracurricular Activities?), but life raising 3 kids still involves a continuous loop of rushing. And doing. And going.

In the abrupt stop ushered by the global pandemic, there was a period of not knowing what to do with ourselves. That anxious, forced inertia when the body wants to move but can’t, felt strange and unpleasant. At first. We faced a summer reality of no block parties, no horseback riding or gymnastics camp, a cancelled first ever Disney World vacation, and maybe the biggest loss -- no pools.

A Monday through Sunday of literally nothing to do and nowhere to go hung like a blank canvas the size of three months of our lives. These kids can barely survive a Saturday morning without knowing the 30 fun things ahead in the weekend; how are they going to get through a whole summer?

“Time took on a different quality in those stretched out hours, those hours missing the arrival and departure times of back-to-back activities. The most surprising part: relatively little complaining about ‘nothing to do’ when this is the least there has ever been to do in their lifetimes.”

As we wrap up these pandemic summer months, it turns out, they got through it better than any summer in our family history. I’ve never seen my children so calm and content (overall). I must include a HUGE caveat, buried in a guilty confession: we had the ultimate luxury of a 35-hour a week college student sitter, for whom they actually cooperated. Although that indulgence may have greased the wheels of change, we like to think we were still in charge of the family chariot and should get at least some credit in the ongoing tally of parenting wins and losses.

My three usually stimulation-seeking children eased into a daily routine of morning TV time, nanny arrival, fun activity which became a rousing matching game every day (so glad it wasn’t with me), an hour of school, and half hour of chores before lunch and outdoor play with a select friend bubble. They left the square of our neighborhood for a weekly ice cream outing, and finally to the re-opened library in the last half of the summer.

It’s not like we made up for their lack of thrilling activity during the week on the weekends. It was basically the same as weekdays: morning TV time, clean the house as needed, outdoor friend play. I think we ran our first errand as a family sometime in the second half of July.

At first, the yawning blankness of an entire Saturday depressed me. But I have come to see it as a temporary gift, almost meditative (as much as that can be true with the noise and mess of children). Time took on a different quality in those stretched out hours, those hours missing the arrival and departure times of back-to-back activities. The most surprising part: relatively little complaining about “nothing to do” when this is the least there has ever been to do in their lifetimes.

Chores Re-imagined: Helpfulness as a State of Being

What I Learned About Children and Parenting in a pandemic summer

I came home from the grocery store one Saturday afternoon, completely irritated with how long this process now takes, and how many products are absent from the shelves. I opened the trunk and directed the younger two children to help me unload the groceries. They said No and ran off into the basement to play. I lugged the bags in, fuming with my martyrdom for all I do for these “ungrateful” kids. My oldest entered the kitchen and surprisingly very obediently began helping me put away the groceries . . . she was clearly the most astute to my current emotional state and saw I was going to blow.

Later, we had a calmer conversation as a family about the expectation that everyone helps whenever there is something to do. This is different from the daily and weekly chores; this is seeing a need to help out, and doing it. Without complaint or question. I totally realize logically that expecting them to make such a sudden behavior change without notice was not realistic. In fact, this does not involve one family discussion, it requires many. Across the lifespan of our family unit. Forever. And we have to make the expectations clear and consistent. Although this was not a new conversation topic in our family, pandemic living has accelerated the urgency of the conversation, and the clarity of the expectations.

This current reality of everyone being in the house all the day long every day of the week means there is simply a lot more to do around the house. And my husband and I refuse to do all of it because we are very tired. Now,without all the obligations of our former life, we have time. We have time for them to take longer than we would for a task, or time for us to do it well after their subpar performance. But they are doing it all independently, and even with very little complaint: dusting, cleaning toilets, vacuuming stairs, making meals, and more. The day my 5-year-old shared, “there was no toilet paper so I got a new one and put it on,” I practically needed fainting salts to revive me.

I recently read how children in a household of two parents with full caregiving capacity have one big disadvantage: they do a lot less for themselves. In cases of single parents, or a parent with a chronic medical illness, for example, children show their capabilities because they have to. And it’s good for them, now and later in life.

This summer has given us the gift of time to expand their chore repertoires, and ultimately prioritize our family’s value of being a helpful human being.

Independence

They’ve been holding out on us! (More accurately, we’ve been holding out on letting them be more independent.)

Even before COVID, I read about free-range parenting and dipped my toes in it while balancing with my parenting partner’s more protective preferences. Despite his focus on safety, though, we both highly value independence and self-sufficiency in our children and would look for avenues to build both, even in modest ways. For example, a “get your own water!” mandate at the dinner table.  

Then we spent 2 ½ months trapped in our house.

When restrictions eased on May 29th to be exact, there was nothing sweeter than them riding their bikes for hours around our neighborhood. Without us.

My children now make breakfast independently, only needing my help when I happen to be present. Obviously, the natural choice is I make myself scarce, and they are fine. They ride their bikes around the neighborhood or build backyard hideouts for hours, because they are escapes from the house, with friends. The marathon bike rides made my heart beat faster in the beginning of summer, but now I’m happy to have a quiet house, and children in the fresh air using their bodies (they do have to check in regularly, we’re not totally hands-off). They are living the 80s childhood of unstructured, un-adulted roaming and wandering, innovating the outdoors with whatever they already have. Bonus: It also makes them very happy.

In fact, another surprising byproduct of all this free-range time with friends has been knowing when they need time alone. In the past, maybe because friend time was more crunched and curated, my children would run themselves ragged beyond their internal cues for down time. Now, my sweet pre-teen actually celebrated one day she declared a day just for her, complete with reading books and making tea (I now call her Grandma). Even my 5-year-old has been able to speak up after some marathon hours with a new friend, “I need a ginormous break.”

It’s like the stripping away of supervision and structure, requiring adult architects, has helped my children know themselves and their needs better.

Don’t Hurt Me

If you are reading this and are feeling violent urges toward my cheerfulness in this dark time, I totally get it. Whatever each of us feels at this moment is valid and real. Not only is optimism wired into my DNA, I know I have much privilege allowing me to see the light of a silver lining. I also know we made choices other families didn’t based on our own risk evaluations, which hopefully we can mutually respect. But you can still feel like hurting me if your summer was a drastically different experience. Hopefully, though, some of my lessons can help poke some holes of light in the darkness.

In fact, after I polished up this very piece of writing, I read this summary of survey findings to discover my children and I are not special after all, with subheadings almost identical to mine. Apparently, my personal case study here illustrates larger trends of children gaining inspiration and independence in this COVID reality.

I want to be clear that within these advances in my children’s daily functioning, there is still no shortage of the usual bickering, meltdowns, selective listening, complaining about dinner, and other various reminders that yes, they are still children.

I also do not want it to seem like I’m just sweeping away valid worries about our children with my broom of positivity, pretending like all is well because my kids make their own food now. I am still vigilant about protecting my children from potential long-term negative effects of this whole scary experience because the risks are real.

Finally, I am dreading the potential downfall of all this progress in the Fall and Winter. I can only hope it will surprise me like the Summer – and my children -- did.