The Extra Challenges of Parenting During COVID-19

COVID blows. Let’s just get that out of the way.

It definitely has some positives mixed in there if you look with the right lens, too. But, for the most part, I think we can all agree that we’d rather move on with 2020 and have more choices that are fun, and less choices that are exhausting.

One of the hardest things I realized about parenting after becoming a parent myself was how many choices are constantly coming up for you to decide how best to raise your child. Even before you actually hold that baby in your arms, your brain is working out the answers to what’s best: Home or hospital birth? Meds or natural? All the newborn baby diagnostics that I forget what they are now but at the time of deciding were the most important activities on the planet to me?

It’s exhausting, man. It doesn’t stop.

And now all this freaking mess.

The hardest thing about COVID for me has been all these extra parenting decisions thrown in an already full and overflowing pot. Big ones, that you know will have an affect on who they become, in ways we may not even understand yet.

But we don’t have a choice. These kids aren’t going to sit still and wait for the pandemic to pass before they keep growing. We have to decide.

Should we send our kids back to school in September? What do we do about playdates? Will we feel comfortable with the new school policies and protocols? Is it safe to play at the playground? How do I explain COVID to my kid? Am I giving them enough attention through this? Are our kids losing out on opportunities, or benefitting from the reduction of busy timetables and extra down time? How much screen time is too much?

And on and on and on.

So we pull up our bootstraps and put our heads and our hearts and our guts into these decisions to the best that we have to give to them, and we make these hard decisions. They won’t be perfect, because we don’t have perfect choices. But we will make them, we will stand by them unless we need to readjust, and boy will we ever second-guess them.

Keep your chin up, parents. This is far from easy, but we’ll get through it. I’m rooting for you no matter what your personal choices for your unique family end up to be.

We’re all doing our best.

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