‘Doomsurfing’ with the kids in a house full of worry. How do we avoid going COVID crazy?
Day Two of our COVID-19-pandemic-quarantine-hellscape, and by noon, I’d yelled at two of my three kids, grounded the third (how do you ground a teenager whose already stuck at home?) taken away one phone, screamed ‘get down!’ at the dog while doing an interview, and stress eaten an entire bag of pita chips.
This is our life for the next eight weeks? At least? Because it’s looking more and more like the kids are not going back to school and we’re not going back to our offices, those wonderful, nurturing, quiet places, for a long time. Most of us have never really lived through anything quite like this. The kids are worried about getting sick, the grown-ups are worried about getting sick, going broke and how we’re all going to survive in an upended world. How is this all going to work exactly without everyone going insane?
I talked to Susan Slade, a child and family psychiatrist in Lexington, who is not working at home because all her appointments are filled with people asking this exact same question.
“Every single patient, the kids, the parents, everyone is anxious,” she said. “So any normalcy you can maintain is really good.”
Slade does not include trying to replicate the exact classroom experience for your kids because, well, you’ll probably fail, frustrating everyone.
“No one really has the same patience for their kids that teachers do,” she said. Instead, schedule some blocks of work time with lots of breaks to do something fun, particularly if it’s outside. Be creative. If your kids are young, set them down with crayons and paper, if they’re old, send them into the kitchen with a cookbook.
Another psychiatrist, Sarah Moon, said people should set realistic expectations about what’s going to happen and get done right now. But there are some silver linings.
“There are many times we’ve wished for more time with our families and now many of us are going to get that,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to spend time with and relate with our families in ways a lot of us rarely get to do.”
Those realistic expectations include not thinking that we’re going to replicate the school day or that our house will be as neat as we’d like it when we’re suddenly there 24 hours a day.
“I don’t think it’s realistic to have a complete ban on TV,” Moon said. “Being physically active is really important too.” Something else to be grateful for? Spring is coming so we can get outside.
Both Slade and Moon stressed how important it is to turn off the 24-hour news, for adults and children. putting away your phone, which can be easier said than we done as we get sucked ever deeper into our vortex of “doomsurfing,” my new favorite expression. Everything is super scary right now, but freaking out about it won’t help.
“All that news is not good for kids, we found that out after 9-11,” Slade said.
Try to eat as healthily as you can. Pita chips are not a balanced meal. Try for as many fruits and vegetables as you can because our bodies have to be healthy to help our stressed minds.
We need to be kind and patient with ourselves and with the people crowded into the house with us. That includes our college-age students, who have just established their own lives on campus, only too be whisked back to their childhood bedrooms.
Speaking of our abodes, we can bask in the joy of the only truly happy creatures right now, our dogs and cats, who finally have as much of us as they want.
Here’s another silver lining. We’ve been so busy and stressed and our kids are so overscheduled and we’re always complaining about it. We’re about to find out very quickly what a slower life is really like. Real slow.
