When it comes to COVID-19 and the impact it’s had on our lives, it’s easy to overlook the state of the homestead. Working and studying from home objectively means more time spent at home, within a safe space; and while that seems like a good thing at surface-level, we must account for the issues that arise within this space to be able to lead healthy lives in the wake of the pandemic.

What follows is a guide for parents that provides tips and sheds light on important considerations, in order to help you healthily face problems at home and in the online environment.

Knowing the difference

As parents in a pre-pandemic world, you and your children were given time to interact together and separately from one another. You’d start your day at home, perhaps by having breakfast together, before heading out for work while your kids left for school. Time away from one another fostered your child’s appetite for independent inquiry and gave you the space to focus on work while taking a breather from the stresses of home.

With the shift in dynamics as “work/study from home” took over, we saw ourselves sacrificing time away from home in order to keep ourselves and our children safe from COVID. Where your child once had the opportunity to sit with other children of a similar age, and engage their faculties of learning, they now spend all day “trapped” at home, trying to adjust to the experience of learning through a screen. Where you once found breaks from household challenges in the form of outward-facing ones, you now face all your troubles from your home office.

Maintaining oversight

Make sure you’ve installed some robust parental controls on your child’s system. There’re a lot of harmful opinions out there, and children have very impressionable minds; you don’t want to have to deal with them after they’ve already settled in. Instead, make it a point to have a “discussion time” after dinner or in the evening. Go over what they learnt across the day and do so with an open mind. You don’t want your child to feel apprehensive sharing their thoughts with you, so even if you do find out something alarming, deal with it calmly and rationally.

Spending time

It’s important that we find ways to spend time at home together in a fun and engaging way, without compromising upon the life lessons that children need in their formative years. Be creative about the recreational activities you have lined up with your children. When they’re spending the majority of their day sitting in front of a screen, watching a show together at the end of it might not be the best idea. Instead, invest in board games and more analogue forms of enjoyment.

You’d be surprised how much better you and your teenager feel after biking around for 20 minutes in the evening. Don’t hesitate to dust off the old Monopoly game or teach them a new playing card game. Experiment as much as you can. As long as you’re maintaining a positive environment and trying to remain empathetic and kind, you will see results eventually.

Dealing with difficult situations

Sometimes we’re faced with stressful situations at home, and these stresses can pile up very quickly when you don’t have avenues to express yourself. If you find yourself faced with bad behaviors and tantrums, try to look for non-confrontational solutions, and when confrontation can’t be avoided, try to stay as calm as possible. Step outside the room and take a few deep breaths if you need to, and then reassess the situation.

Try to redirect your child towards good behaviors instead of focusing on the bad ones; punishment should be your last resort, not your first option. If the problem persists, and you feel like you have no alternative besides handing out consequences, always remain calm during the process. You want your child to receive those consequences as your proactive action, and not your reaction to what they did. Also ensure that you only resort to consequences you can enforce meaningfully; no videogames for a day are much more likely to achieve the desired impact than no phone access for a week. The last thing you want your child to take away from the experience is that you’re just trying to make them suffer. Always focus on the action you’re trying to discourage instead of the means by which you discourage it.

Lending structure and Promoting empathy

Rely on a routine to help you structure the day’s activities. It’ll give your kids the opportunity to look forward to play-time, and the motivation to power through the last few bits of their homework. Kids need structured routines to help during the developmental process, you should do your best to incorporate activities in a way that supplements not just their schoolwork, but also their growth into well-rounded human beings. This could be as simple as playing a memory-based trivia game about their recent science lessons, or as complex as discussing their opinion on COVID and the way it’s effected your lives. Always listen intently, and never condescend; a child’s problems may seem small to an adult who’s lived through a breadth of experiences, but to the child they’re still issues of the utmost importance. Listen to understand, not to critique; and speak to inform, not to admonish.

Speaking of listening, you should always try to engage with your children about the stuff they’re hearing online or from their schoolmates. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and you should do your best to identify it early so that you can nip it in the bud. COVID is not an issue of race, religion, or creed, and it’s important that our kids know that as they head back into a diverse, multicultural environment once this whole situation is over.

Staying Positive

Psychologists have described the pandemic as a sort of “Global Traumatic Event” that we are going through as a species. It’s important that we curb the impact of this trauma in our lives at the household level, so that this “positivity” may trickle up to the point where humanity itself can cope. All of this depends on our ability to maintain positive environments within our own locus of effectiveness. It’s being kind to our coworkers, our subordinates, and most of all, our kids, to ensure that they’re able to propagate that positivity forward.

Keep yourself from getting flustered, and if you ever notice your child seems down, take the time out to talk to them about what’s on their mind. A little conversation can go a long way. Most of all, always maintain an open channel of communication, and let your child know they can always approach you if they need someone to talk to. Life during the pandemic may be hard on both you and your child, but with timely commitment to the right things, at least we have a shot at making it just a little more bearable.

The Tech side of things

Technology has enabled us to live somewhat normal lives in the face of everything that’s happened in the past two years. The hybrid workplace has emerged onto the scene, and the same concept has been applied to classrooms as well; teachers deliver lessons that are supplemented by technological outfitting that aims to bridge the gap between an online class and an in-person one.

But the classroom and the office weren’t the only things that changed. As we brought these locations home, we changed not only the nature of those locations, but the nature of home itself. The modern home is all three: office, home, and classroom. Where a regular day’s journey on any given day took a person around their city, now it takes us around our homes. Our coworkers and fellow students are still our companions in this journey, and yet, on a different level, our only companions are our kids and our spouses – basically anyone we share a roof with.

In this sense, our lives have coalesced into a similar pattern. We spend all day with our kids, and our kids spend all day with us. The role of a parent now represents a certain impartial companionship that was once overridden by patriarchal and matriarchal orientations. Where these classical roles would’ve meted out a certain power dynamic, the modern parent-child relationship is far more egalitarian. Discipline, and the way it is encouraged, has changed starkly from what it once was. With parents being given more of a chance to connect to their kids, they’re now much more likely to lead by example, instead of trying to enforce arbitrary rules. They’re much more likely to respect their child’s space, and vice versa, because the dynamics of being at home all day have suddenly given both parent and child the opportunity to relate to each other, and made personal space that much more important. Perhaps, in this sense, we could say some good actually came of what has been a decidedly terrible ordeal; parents and children now know each other much better than they ever could’ve in a world before COVID.

While this may be true, it is also true that the vast majority of everything else has now shifted to the digital realm. Our friendships, work, and essential processes are now all online. How this will impact the way human beings congregate and communicate remains to be seen, but one thing is definitely certain: the relationship between parent and child will play a greater role in informing the rest of our relationships as we head forward.