Fighting quarantine fatigue with yet another newsletter. I love all of your emails, links and memes –you can find them in my past newsletters. I’m also thrilled to hear that people are forwarding this along – if you’re new, join my mailing list. And, as always, thanks for protecting yourself and others by staying home when you can, washing your hands slightly obsessively, and masking up!
It’s time to talk about our kids, their social lives, and COVID. Or more precisely, to talk about talking to them. Just because there’s a single lethal coronavirus circulating out in our world (okay, two strains if you want to get technical), it doesn’t mean there’s one answer to the question of how you should live your life or how I should live mine. Ditto that for our kids. But the reverse – the notion that everyone should make up the rules according to their own interpretation of data about a novel viral threat that has brought the world to a standstill – has created simmering social chaos, not to mention lots of judgmental sidebars. There’s no precise way your kids (or you, for that matter) should socialize during pandemic, just like there’s not one way to braid your hair. There are general rules and guidelines, facts your kids (and you) need to understand in order to help keep all of us safe. I have hammered those rules in every newsletter this summer, so I will skip that for now. Rather, I want to focus on the key step of empowering our kids to make the best in-the-moment choices possible, because that’s what will decrease the likelihood – theirs and ours – of catching coronavirus. Bonus: this smart-thinking skill ages well, and it carries over into every other corner of their lives.
Below I offer a series of tips written for parents of tweens and teens, but at the end of each one is a younger spin that’s fairly easy to adapt. In fact, if you have younger kids and you are attempting to talk to them about balancing hanging out with friends and not catching some invisible infection that probably won’t even make them feel sick, you should congratulate yourself! Because just like the sex talk, any talk about balancing happiness and health can start young. Also, just like the sex talk, plan to have these types of conversations endlessly throughout the pandemic. And also like the sex talk, there is such a thing as too much information too soon, which is usually met with a glazed-over look, tears, or your kid leaving the room. These are clues that the conversation is over for now.
To start your how-to-hang-with-friends-in-pandemic conversation, acknowledge the facts. This COVID thing has been going on for a long time now, with no end in sight. Are we even halfway to any sort of visible light at the end of the life-in-semi-isolation tunnel? No one knows. Anyone who tells you they do is full of it. If you begin your conversation here, acknowledging the endlessness of this moment, you are off to a good start. (Younger kid tip: Their sense of time expands and contracts very differently than ours, so don’t get too caught up on this one.)
Next, put it right out there that humans are social creatures. Even the most introverted among us, even the ones who relished the early days of quarantine, still draw energy from interactions with other humans. If you are going to engage your kid in a conversation about why he shouldn’t be giving over to all of the very normal, healthy impulses to be with friends – be it connecting, sharing space, wrestling, flirting, or just sitting at a table closer than 6 feet apart for God’s sake – one of the best ways to do this is to put it out there that you are asking him to behave in a way that runs counter to our very human nature. (Younger kid tip: If your kid is too young to understand this concept, it’s probably unfair to set up a playdate with strict distancing rules that he cannot follow.)
If you are struggling with framing your social rules in comparison to some other family’s rules, stop yourself right there. In parenting, you do you. Own that. Explain why you are comfortable – or uncomfortable – with a given scenario, which does not mean apologizing for setting a limit but does provide a rationale for it. Don’t throw another family under a pile of heavy judgments, but instead focus on what works for your family. And own the fact that you will get it wrong some of the time, or the data may change and your rules may evolve. Pandemic parenting is no different than regular parenting in this regard: we are all entitled to do-overs, and sometimes those reevaluations work very much in your kid’s favor. P.S.: They love when that happens! (Younger kid tip: Now is as good a time as any for your kids to begin to understand that the rules in your house will be different than the rules in some of their friends’ houses, and that’s absolutely fine.)
As you are talking through social scenarios, remind your kids that they are kids, and that the limits you might set for them have far less to do with trust than they have to do with the fact that their brains aren’t fully mature. We all know there exists deep imbalance between the emotional, risk taking, feel good part of the brain – the famous limbic system – which is fully on-board by middle school and the consequential, cautious prefrontal cortex that won’t be completely mature until close to age 30. Many kids know this too, by the way, because it’s now considered a basic fact of neuroscience. Well, in the time of COVID, the battle between these regions can result in some pretty epic outcomes, particularly when the limbic system drives kids to make impulsive – read: bad – decisions. Remind your kids that at certain times, it’s your job to be their peripheral brain. Pandemic seems like one of those times. (Younger kid tip: The little ones are impulsive, not to mention wired to test out the world, so if you are encouraging social interactions, you’ll also need to be present with your eyes on the situation in order to help redirect them from time to time.)
And most importantly, let them talk. The current state of affairs – from pandemic to wildfires to floods to venomous political acrobatics in an election year – just plain sucks. There’s a ton going on for our kids, much of it patently abnormal. They need to share their feelings. If you open up a dialogue and then stop talking, they may just begin to fill that void. In fact, sometimes the very best way to get them to be vocal is for you not to say a peep. (Younger kid tip: Try your best not to open the conversation by planting seeds of what they should fear or how they might feel; instead, ask them open-ended questions and help them to put words to their emotions.)
The ultimate irony is that while many of us feel very alone in setting social guidelines for our kids, we’re all swimming together in these murky waters. The only certainty at this moment, really, is uncertainty. So regardless of how you open up conversations with your kids and what you cover, file away in the back of your mind that the circumstances will change, the virus will come and go, and the grand plans for everything from school reopenings to the return of travel and birthday parties will remain in flux, at least for now. Talking about all of it helps.
Before the links today, a quick pause to point out some amazing charities. If you are reading this newsletter from a comfortable spot and want to share some resources with others who need them at the moment, consider these:
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Stream for Starlight is a month-long virtual campaign to help Starlight Children’s Foundation deliver happiness to seriously ill kids. While watching streams of just about anything – from workouts to music to cooking classes and of course gaming – you can donate directly and also drive donations from others. The dollars raised provide programs to make life brighter for hospitalized kids.
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Common Sense Media is increasingly committed to addressing the digital divide. During the pandemic and transition to remote learning, they have led the charge on supporting families and schools. Tonight their annual big event! Tune in to Common Sense Together: Building a Better Tomorrow, streaming live at 5pm PT on Wednesday September 16th (yep, just a few hours away!)
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The LA Parks Foundation Safer at Parks initiative has repurposed 60 park spaces into remote learning facilities offering supervised distanced learning complete with free wifi access as well as afterschool activities. You can register here. But spaces are limited and nothing in this world is free, so if you don’t need the space for your family, consider donating to help someone else.
And now, links! Let’s start with some excellent news that sprung up over the past few days: Middle + high schooler vaping rates have dropped by a third over the past year. Better yet, this data was collected before most schools moved online and families shut themselves in, so it feels like a fair guess that tween and teen vaping didn’t increase when everyone was hunkering down with mom and dad.
Another fabulous tidbit came in the form of this piece that argues doing things that bring you pleasure – activities that can be considered hedonistic, even – in the short term can be as good for you as following through on more serious, taxing long-term goals.
A small study out of Utah provides less good news though: 12 kids picked up COVID in daycare settings and then these kids passed the infection along to another dozen non-facility contacts, including one mom who wound up hospitalized. Lots of issues with this study, including the fact that only symptomatic individuals were tested for COVID, so the number of cases and transmissions were likely underestimated. Read the CDC report here.
And a different study unfortunately threw shade on restaurant dining. In this one, 154 people with symptomatic COVID and 160 negative control subjects were asked about their activities in the prior two weeks – those who tested positive were more than twice as likely to have reported eating out at a restaurant. I couldn’t agree more with Paul Sax, who wrote: All this information about restaurants and COVID-19 risk makes me very sad.
I get asked quite often about coronavirus vaccine – and particularly whether a vaccine (once it is available) should be mandated for kids to return to school. While this editorial doesn’t exactly answer that question, it does give a really nice framework to how we should be thinking about mandatory COVID vaccines.
