Living with Children

Walking around the neighborhood.

I’m on day 29 of sheltering in place. I think about parents who used to drop their kids off to school and go to their offices. Now they’re home — with their kids — trying to teach and do their jobs. How do they do it all? I fortunately am not in that situation. I have myself to keep going and I don’t have kids at home who are bored or need to be taught.

I ran into an interesting article on this subject written by psychologist John Rosemond called LIVING WITH CHILDREN: Bored kids at home? Stop parenting. You can read the entire article in the Gazette-Virginian by clicking here.

Here are a few excerpts:

One website is titled “How to Cope with Kids During Coronavirus.”

Another, featuring a staged photo of an obviously frazzled mom with a toddler on her lap, tells the reader that “Parents are losing their minds having kids at home during coronavirus!”

There’s yet another, advising on “How to Keep Kids Entertained During the Crisis.”

On and on it goes, website after website counseling parents on how to deal with being confined at home with one’s kids.

The early 21st century may be remembered as the “Age of the Personal Soap Opera.” A person makes a soap opera out of a life situation, claims victimhood, garners sympathy, manufactures more soap opera, garners more sympathy, and so on. Soap opera begets soap opera. Forty-plus years of counseling experience has taught me that once a person becomes caught in the soap opera loop, it is harder than hard to get out.

For thousands of years, it was normal for children to be at home. It never occurred to parents that they might need “support” or advice to deal with that circumstance. Everyone was in the same sturdy boat. Furthermore, the boat had two paddles and was helmed by one or two adults who obviously knew how and in what direction to row. No one went running pell-mell down the road screaming that their kids had pushed them over the edge.

Rosemond explains in his article that the concept of “parenting” is new. Parenting is putting our children in the center of our lives. We live to make things easier for them. We want them to be happy and not struggle. It’s not that our parents didn’t care, they understood viewed their role as a parent differently. They new life was never perfect and at times hard. They understood that their number one job was to get us out of the nest and to be able to fly on our own.

Here’s a bit more of the article that I seriously can relate to, since my mom was the queen of chore lists:

Growing up, I was blessedly deprived of a mother who “parented.” My non-parenting mother, who was a single parent during most of my first seven years, did not put me at the center of her attention and hardly felt it was her job to keep me occupied. That responsibility fell squarely on my little shoulders.

“Bored, eh? If you can’t find something to do, I’ll find something for you to do.”

And just like that, I found something to do, knowing that Mom’s solution would not be at all to my liking, as in “You’re going to wash the kitchen floor and if you’re still bored, I have plenty of other things with which to un-bore you.”

Chores were a part of my daily life as a kid as well. But I wasn’t given a choice of entertaining myself or doing chores. Chores came first, then we got to play. Also, my mom had a secret weapon. A timer. We practiced piano to the timer. We weeded to the timer. We vacuumed to the timer. And then she had the nerve to tell us that we had it so much easier than she did as a kid. I’m sure she’s right. We had all those new-fangled inventions like washing machines, dryers and refrigerators. She grew up in the day of ice boxes where an ice truck delivered chunks of ice to keep the food cold and wringer washers.

A wringer washer

For parents who are home with their children, it’s a perfect opportunity to instill some chores into their daily routines. I do believe a routine is helpful to get through the days that seem to run together.

What type of chores are you having your kids do while you’re sheltering in place? What games, books or other activities are they doing to keep from getting bored?