Parenting Athletes in a COVID-19 World
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Our role as parents is to love our children, to provide for their basic needs (food, shelter, clothing) and to attend to their whole development. This includes their physical, emotional moral and spiritual health. As COVID-19 forces us all into the unique experience of sheltering at home, today’s
Champion Parent Note
seeks to support parents as we navigate this new reality. Below are some of the key areas we should all be attending to, with ideas for how we can provide for our families during this time.
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Love
Express your love for your children with words and actions every day. Embrace them in a hug. Express your love with a variety of encouraging statements. In addition to saying "I love you," here are
“100 Ways to Encourage a Child
."
Especially in days of uncertainty, we all need words of affirmation to boost our morale.
Attend to your child’s whole development:
Physical Movement
With the absence of organized sport, parents should encourage children to continue to get exercise every day. Exercise is good for the body and mind - both for your child
and
for yourself. Participate in movement together as a family. Select an activity that is fun and line-up friendly competitions among family members to stress personal bests (ex. beat the number of times you can jump rope in 60 seconds). Keep a
log
of your daily movements where you set goals and track your family's progress. To help you,
Play Like a Champion
has setup an online page filled with a variety of resources and activities to get you and your children moving: visit
https://www.playlikeachampion.org/active-kids
.
Emotional Well-Being
We are all struggling with this disruption to our routine. Children rely on routines constructed by others to help them feel safe and to know what comes next. With the interruption caused by COVID-19, parents and children will experience a variety of difficult feelings such as anxiety and fear; these may manifest in behavioral issues with children that include difficulty sleeping, nightmares, testing limits and meltdowns. As parents,
acknowledge
that these feelings are real. Avoid saying, “You shouldn’t feel that way.” Help your children to express how they feel by making a family discussion about feelings a regular activity. Once kids learn how to express how they feel, they can start to cope with and manage their emotions.
Recognize that in this crisis, we all experience loss: loss of routine, loss of our freedom of movement, loss of social interactions, school, sports, church and activities. Additionally, many families will experience loss of a job or the loss of loved ones. Even watching the news can provide a sense of loss associated with mounting deaths in our country and community. Experiencing loss leads to feeling
grief
.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross originally identified the Stages of Grief in her 1969 book
On Death and Dying
. The five stages are Denial, Anger, Depression, Bargaining and Acceptance. These stages relate to our current situation:
- Denial: This virus won’t affect my family.
- Anger: It's not fair that I have to stay home and have my activities taken away.
- Bargaining: If I social distance for two weeks everything will be better, right?
- Sadness: I don’t know when this will end.
- Acceptance. This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed.
Acceptance is where our power lies as parents. We can find courage and control in acceptance:
I can wash my hands. I can keep a safe distance. I can learn how to study/work virtually.
Acknowledge each stage of these feelings with your family and help move yourself and your children toward acceptance of this situation.
Additional tips to maintaining and improving the emotional health of your family:
- Find a personal retreat space. It is important that every family member have a separate space where they can retreat to think, relax and re-group when stressed. For children, it may be as simple as a beanbag chair in your living room. Make this space "cozy" by using blankets, pillows, cushions or stuffed friends. It is comforting to know that even though it may seem as if we are living on top of each other, we each have our own special place to go.
- Find levity and humor in each day. There is a lot to be worried about, and with good reason. Balance this heaviness with something funny each day: have every family member tell a "joke of the day," search for funny YouTube videos, or stage a stand-up comedy show performed by family members.
- Find an expressive art. Our emotional brain is very receptive to the creative arts, which is a direct portal for the release of feeling. Find something that is creative: sculpting with Play-Doh, drawing, dancing, making music, singing, finger-painting, making a collage, etc. Make this a family activity! This is a very effective way of helping kids to emote, communicate and find relief for their feelings.
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Moral Purpose
David Kessler co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss
. Kessler wrote another book on the topic in which he adds an additional stage to the grief process,
Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief.
Kessler's message is not to end the grief process at acceptance of the situation, but work to find
meaning
in the most difficult times. There is a lot of scary, negative, and overwhelming information to take in regarding this pandemic. There are also many stories of people sacrificing, donating, and supporting one another in amazing ways. It is important to counter-balance the difficult news with hopeful information and find a way your family can contribute to the greater good amidst this challenge. You might make cards for health care workers, mail carriers and/or the elderly in nursing homes who cannot receive visitors. You might offer to run errands for a neighbor with underlying health issues. Some families are utilizing technology to connect and grow relationships, others are learning to appreciate taking a walk. Strive to find meaning now and when this is over. This certainly won’t be remembered as a happy period in the history of our world, but it may be remembered as a time of redemptive meaning and hope.
The term
"tragic optimism"
was coined by Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist from Vienna.
Tragic optimism
is the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life despite its inescapable pain, loss and hardships. As we experience stress and even despair, we must acknowledge the difficulty of our current situation. But amidst these most difficult times, we can find glimmers of light, and this will ultimately sustain us. We can go beyond just coping, we can work to adopt this spirit of
tragic optimism
to enable us to actually grow through this adversity. After this crisis, perhaps as a community we can develop deeper relationships and a greater appreciation of life, while working to support others more directly around us.
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Spiritual Health
As a family, make time to pray together each day. Additionally, take time as a family every evening to express
gratitude
. Expressing daily gratitude for the blessings that we have will remind us where God's goodness and grace exist while helping us to embrace
tragic optimism
. In our Christian tradition, we recognize the theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity (Love) as the foundation for our moral lives. When a family relies on their Christian faith, they can find
hope
to persist despite hardships like the one we now experience. In his
Easter homily
this week, Pope Francis pointed out that in Easter, "we acquire a fundamental right that can never be taken away from us:
the right to hope
." Noting that hope is not mere optimism, but "a gift from heaven," the Holy Father explained that hope "plants in our hearts the conviction that God is able to make everything work unto good, because even from the grave he brings life." Through faith, Christians can embrace the understanding that through suffering and loss, we can truly live. During this Easter week, as we celebrate Christ’s victory over death and His great love for us, let us embrace the crosses we are called to bear and seek meaning in a way that draws our families closer together and closer to Him.
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Families: We would like to
hear from
you
about the ways you are attending to your family’s whole health while social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. Connect with us on social media or email us via [email protected]. By sharing our difficulties and the ways we're coping, we can continue to support one another. We’ll get through this together!
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Scripture of the Week:
"
May your unfailing love be with us, Lord, even as we put our hope in you."
Psalm 33:22
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Join Us for a Virtual Workshop: Support & Resources for Families During COVID-19
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As both work and school shift to home in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world of families has been turned upside-down. While this can lead to unexpected joys for a family, it can also lead to added pressure and stress. What's worse, many families are missing one of the key outlets for their physical, mental and social energy: youth and high school sports. With this in mind,
Play Like a Champion
invites all of our partner schools, leagues and ALL PARENTS to join our presentation on ways to manage your family’s stress while we provide resources to support parents in their efforts to create a safe and nurturing home environment. The workshop will also provide an opportunity for families to engage in a conversation
on the unique and varied challenges this pandemic presents to families.
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There is Actually a Saint Corona!
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This little-known saint died over 1,800 years ago and her remains are in a basilica in the town of Anzu in Northern Italy. She was an early Christian martyr believed to have consoled a Christian soldier named Victor who was being tortured, after which she professed her own faith and was killed as well. Saint Corona allegedly had a vision of two crowns descending from the sky, one for herself and one for her fellow Christian. The name
Corona
is Latin for “crown”. The coronavirus gets its name from the crown-like spikes on its surface.
Saint Corona has become the go-to saint for protection against contagions, even though she has historically been considered the patron saint of treasure hunters. St. Edmund the Martyr, who died in 869 in England, is considered the patron saint of pandemic victims. With many of us looking for security in our up-ended world, we can turn to the rich tradition of the saints for inspiration. Saint Corona offered consolation to a suffering person in Saint Victor. As parents, we can look to her example to inspire us to love and console our children and support our community and world through this crisis.
Saint Edmund the Martyr, Pray for us!
Saint Corona, Pray for us!
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