Kids are sitting there, isolated in a room, talking to their friends, their world, through electronic devices. You can call it homeschooling, distant learning, virtual learning or whatever you want, fact is kids are learning from home instead of from school.
Parents have become educators, coaches, entertainers, schedulers, planners, supervisors, and play mates over night, and no one signed up for this! But here we are, doing it anyways. So, of course, it comes with a few challenges.
The parent’s job before the pandemic:
- their actual jobs
- the usual tasks of taking care of family and household
That already adds up to 200%!
The current additional challenges:
- mentally and physically preparing their kids to sit down (and stay!) in front of a computer for several hours a day
- making sure they get off during breaks
- making sure they get back on
- staying on top of everyone’s schedule (Alexa can help with that! Or if that doesn’t work, try OK Google, your husband might have switched the device without telling you!)
- texting another parent to ask to let the teacher know you have been stuck in the waiting room for 30 min
- knowing your kids’ grade level material to be able to teach it to them.
- feeding them when on break and hungry (which is basically any time!)
- getting them to prepare all their necessary material (which of course has been moved to a different place every day, as becomes very quickly obvious in the zoom meeting questions: “Teacher, I don’t know where my work sheet, work book, white board, eraser, pencils, markers, crayons, etc, are!”)
- making sure they get off zoom when they accidentally end up in a break out room without a teacher!
- tolerating the overlapping sounds of several videos, classrooms full of kids talking, and husband working on zoom, brought to you all at once, to your quiet space in your home, through several devices! (my older son can listen to several videos at once while talking to his friends! But God forbid I ask him to do 2 things in one sentence!)
And when you have done all that and think this is all you can handle, here is your last but not least to-do-list:
“Parent’s challenge beyond homeschooling” checklist:
- getting them outside to make sure they get plenty of fresh air, movement, and sunshine (that’s when you become a soccer coach over night!)
- feeding them extra healthy, immune boosting foods (check out my blog Eat the rainbow)
- avoiding any additional screen time at night since they already spend too many hours on it daily
- making sure they get social interactions through playdates (there goes what was left of your free time!)
- making sure they get enough, good quality, restorative sleep (What we need to know about sleep)
- and also very important, making sure their digestive system works well and bowels move regularly (See my blog How to read your poop), because if your digestive system does not work, no other system can be nourished and function properly, and you will be much more prone to disease.
We are doing all this trying to avoid getting sick from a virus that may be here for quite some time, a virus like many others that is part of life and will always be (see my blog Who is the enemy?). So make sure you focus on the “parent’s challenge beyond homeschooling” checklist, because this is what will make a difference in the end!
Good luck everyone and stay healthy and happy!
