The pandemic has greatly altered the role of parenting.
What we thought were well laid plans for our children turn out to be not-so-good plans during a pandemic.
We have to change our perspectives and our actions too.
How do you parent during a pandemic? What do you do?
Home is the centerpiece
Home takes center stage during the pandemic. Everyone is spending more time at home, and thinking about how to make their homes more welcoming. Home is now the restaurant, school, health center, and workplace. This is a change for many families. How do we make this a positive change?
It is important to take some time to think about this change and determine how you can support this change with long term investments of home repairs, organization, and space revision.
First, it's a good time to shore up your home by making simple repairs, organizing messy spaces, and getting rid of unused, outdated, and unnecessary items. Then consider the spaces--do you have the spaces you need for education, work, play, relaxation, cooking, and more. After that, work with your family to revise and remake spaces in your home to support the good work and connections you want to continue during this time.
New learning is critical
Everyone is learning a lot during this pandemic. Children are learning at home. Family members are learning via their work at home. Many are making work transitions, and this involves a lot of learning. Everyone is learning about the pandemic, and many are invested in learning about upcoming elections too. With this in mind, figure out the best ways to maximize that learning. Sign on to high quality tech tools, acquire useful tech devices, and create good patterns of learning.
For children, make the learning as active as possible--plant gardens, take nature hikes, create, read, write, watch films together and talk about them, engage in meaningful conversation, read the newspaper, and dream. Learning is a natural event for children, and there are countless tools that assist optimal learning, tools that update and modernize the ways children can learn in brain-friendly ways.
There are lots of ways for adults to learn too. One friend has a documentary-club. Her club watches one documentary a week, then meets online to discuss it. We can focus on particular goals such as learning about specific issues that affect good living in the United States, understanding our government better, learning about investments, or figuring out how to live in more sustainable ways.
The pandemic has slowed down our lives in many ways, and this slower speed, less commuting, and litte people-to-people connections in real time, makes more time for worthy, meaningful learning. To invest in this is a positive goal that will result in long term gain.
Values
This is a good time to reconsider your values--a good time to make time to reflect on what really matters to you and how you are going to make those values come alive in the way you live your life.
Contribution
This is also a good time to think about contribution--how can you contribute to lighten the load for others, support your local communities, and care for your family members well.
Parenting during a pandemic has challenged all of our expectations and plans--it has changed the way we live. We can take a long term view of these changes and use this interruption to reset our homes, learning, values, and contribution for the better. Then when this all passes, we'll have something of value--a renewed way of living that celebrates the tried-and-true traditions we miss as well as the new lifeways we've decided to embrace.