Tips for Parenting during COVID
2020 will forever be known as the “year of COVID”. It has changed our way of life, and has sent many of us into existential shock as we navigate the uncertain road ahead.
And while us adults struggle to get our head around this new way of “being”, our children have also been thrust into this new and emerging reality.
As a mum with a teenage daughter I have found myself on occasion obsessing about what her future will look like. I know I’m not alone there. I have also found myself noticing the impact that my emotional “roller-coasting” has had on her. Now this isn’t anything new, but in our current climate of turmoil and uncertainty, it’s like someone has thrown a gallon of petrol on a smouldering fire.
We must also remember that in this post-feminist, or 4th wave feminism world of Trump and conservatism, the clarity we once had about what it means to be a woman has become clouded. Global fear and uncertainty it seems has contributed to people becoming less tolerant of each other. Feminism has become synonymous with “man hater” and the #metoo movement has given voice to an anti-feminist movement deriving it’s power from right wing conservative capitalist groups. Does “girl power” still exist in it’s positive motivating form?
What all of this means is that in my clinical practice, more than ever, this year has seen an influx of young women struggling with debilitating anxiety/stress. It seems that the previously stable base from which these young women ventured, to explore the world before them, has vanished. Replaced by something far more uncertain and potentially threatening and harmful.
So what can parents do? Of course being aware of our own visceral reactions to the world around us is important. What’s more important is how these reactions play out in the way we parent.
Let me give an example. At my local shopping centre last week I was aware of a father walking with his young daughter in front of me. She was around 6 years old. As she instinctively reached out to grab the moving hand rail to stabilise herself as she stepped onto the escalator I overheard the panicked voice of her worried father “NO, don’t touch that it has the virus all over it”. Mirroring her father’s obvious distress, the daughter jerked her hand away as though she had just received an electric shock, immediately apologising to her dad and asking for the hand sanitiser.
I’m not judging or blaming this worried dad. He has been tasked with the impossible job of protecting his child from a deadly, invisible and silent threat. Having said that, my 10 year old son who was with me at the time turned to me and said “wow, that’s one way to make your kid terrified of life”.
We can’t control or know what the future will look like for our children. But we can start to think about the skills that we want to equip them with to navigate that uncertainty. What do they need in their tool box? In my opinion, there are 6 tools that are a must:
1) Media literacy: Understanding the underlying messages portrayed by the media, and how information is manipulated to achieve a desired outcome.
2) Critical thinking: Asking questions, not accepting information on face value and actively researching and evaluating information portrayed as “facts”.
3) Resilience: Being able to bounce back from setbacks. Learning from failure instead of letting it define you.
4) Confidence: Knowing that you can handle what life throws at you, even if that means knowing who/where to go for help.
5) Self-Awareness: Being aware of triggers, and understanding emotional reactions.
6) Sense of community: Understanding the power that comes from being part of a group – and with it, the meaning and purpose that comes from a sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself.
These are tools that can be formed during childhood, and refined during adult years. As parents, we have an important role to give our children the tools early so that they can practice and refine them as they grow and develop.
Sometimes this means we learn together, and that’s ok. Part of teaching our kids to be resilient is showing them that their parents don’t always have the answers, and that they make mistakes and fail. This is what it means to be human. However these experiences do not define us, they allow us to grow.