Fitting Into Our Kids’ Shoes  

I have spent the past couple of weeks holed up in my office, burying myself in work while rationalizing declined calls, unanswered texts, and an utter absence of downtime. Forget about seeing other humans in real life. I have a hundred reasons – most of them with a Zoom passcode attached – at the ready for why there’s no time. As a result, I have cleared my desk (sort of) and brought my inbox to a manageable(-ish) volume. I have also turned into a moody and unpredictable force to be reckoned with.

The irony, of course, is that I have spent the past eight months furiously parenting in the opposite direction. Every day I tell my kids they need to take breaks, beg them to move their computers outside for at least an hour of school time, and harp on them to connect with friends. These are the things they must do in order to feel human, I explain over and over. I took my own advice for the first seven months of this pandemic, modeling precisely how I hoped they would live, and it worked! We all breathed fresh air daily, we rediscovered our local neighborhood, and we became those people who schedule walks with friends, albeit masked and from a distance, which has become habit but will never not feel weird. We have experienced deep gratitude, not only for our food and shelter but for our health and wellness, too. It hasn’t been perfect by any stretch, but life during pandemic has been, in some odd way, balanced.

So what changed? Simply put: I stopped living the way I told my kids they needed to. I ignored my own parenting advice. October came and I grew so tired of living in semi-isolation that, without any obvious precipitator, I shifted into near-total retreat. After a few days, I was the one behaving like a moody teenager, showering my family with affection until I felt instantly annoyed when they couldn’t read my mind. There were moments of being emotionally transported back to the 1980s when I rode that rollercoaster for the first time.

After a day or two, I was able to extract myself. Probably the thing that pulled me out most swiftly was a comment from my daughter on the heels of a New York Times article quoting me as saying we should listen to our kids now more than ever and maybe even skip the lecture. “Mom, you have a lot to learn from yourself,” she told me. I laughed, posted the article and her comment on social media, and a few hours later found myself smacked over the head with the realization that she was 100% right. I have spent two decades teaching parents there isn’t a piece of parenting advice that doesn’t also apply to them – from hygiene to screen time to safety measures. Everything we caution kids to do would benefit us as well. Thanks to a 17-year old, I pulled myself out of my office-hole, started taking walks again, called friends, and felt my emotional pendulum settle back towards the middle.

On the heels of this experience, I have immersed myself in content about what life is currently like for kids. Through this lens, I found two articles and one film that resonated particularly loudly. Whether or not you have felt the emotional swings of your own adolescence recently, I encourage you to read/watch them, too.

  • The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning is a painful but incredibly important piece about hard scrabble, almost invisible life in the inner city of Baltimore. It’s a call to action because this story is by no means limited to one child or even one city.

  • Claudia Conway’s TikToks, Explained reminds us that no matter how much social media has normalized voyeurism, sometimes (maybe oftentimes?) a teenager is calling out for help, not for the spotlight.

  • The Social Dilemma tells the tale of how social media was intentionally designed to capture endless time and attention, and that was only the beginning. Your kids will likely roll their eyes when you recommend they watch this, but try to make them watch it anyhow. Once they have insight into how they are being manipulated, they will thank you… and they might just change their technology habits.

For those of you looking for your regular COVID article fix, here are a handful.

I have lost count of how many of you sent this to me… had to share with the rest. Love my American Girl family!

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