Lockdown Parenting
The COVID lockdown here in Switzerland began in March of 2020 and lasted for about 2 months before schools reopened (very luckily for us). My normal job of parenting and caring for our kids became much more difficult with all of their schooling, activities, and playdates being cancelled, and there was also the new challenge of keeping the kids out of their Mom’s hair while she was working from home. She’s still working from home, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, but that’s a whole ‘nother topic.
While my kids generally like staying home, the main difficulties that we ran into were lack of structure, an excess of pent up energy, non-screen quiet/alone time became difficult to find, and helping my 2nd year kindergartener with her “homework” was really difficult because of the baby and 4 year old.
Making a schedule helped the kids and I get through the day more contentedly. We all felt that our needs were met when we would talk about what we all wanted to do, and then wrote out a plan that tried to reasonably accommodate everyone’s top thing or two that they wanted to do that day. I was flexible about deviating from the plan if it didn’t leave someone feeling like they were unfairly missing out on what they wanted.
Creating spaces in the home where kids can have alone time or burn off some energy helped us immensely. My partner had the idea of getting a small trampoline for the balcony (don’t worry) and a hanging chair/swing for the living room, which was great. Sometimes kids just need to jump around and be crazy, and the trampoline was great for that, as were little obstacle courses and laps/races around parts of the house. Our son can spend hours everyday hanging out in the hanging chair with a toy, or just resting. When the possession of the hanging chair becomes a point of contention, I can always take it down (hang it with carabiners!).
Recognizing the novelty of the moment and knowing that it’s okay to ask for help is not always easy to do, especially when you are trying hard to rise to an occasion. As a Hausmann, it’s chiefly my responsibility to be the caregiver for our kids and organizer/point-of-contact for their activities so that my partner has the support that she needs to be able to focus on her work as the provider/breadwinner for the family. Men are sometimes met with skepticism about their abilities to properly take care of their children (a corollary to Women being met with prejudice and bias in the workforce), and although I can’t speak for all Stay-At-Home-Dads, I know that I feel an extra pressure to prove through my parenting and cooking and organizing and other things that the classic gender roles aren’t set in stone, and that such stereotypes are bullshit, for lack of a better word.
When the lockdown started, it became impossible for me to do everything for all of the kids all of the time without getting stressed out and overstretched (I was especially worried about keeping it quiet enough for meetings to go smoothly in the home office). Asking my partner to watch the kids so I could take a break to take a shower or go for a walk or a bike ride or a practice/composition session was sometimes necessary for my sanity. The time that my partner used to spend commuting was more than the amount of time that it would take for her to be there for the big kids while I put the baby down for a nap, and being able to ask her for help at the right time is actually a huge bonus of the current situation. She was also able to help our oldest kid with her homework sometimes while I watched the other two, which was a lifesaver.
Even as we made some necessary adjustments to make staying-home all the time more feasible, it was quite clear that we needed to get out of the apartment for at least several hours at least several times each week, as our kids are little volcanoes that erupt unpredictably and flood into the home office at inopportune moments.
Despite being home all the time, the kids really didn’t want to leave the apartment (except for the 1.5 year old, who kept trying to escape). Personally, I didn’t care what it is that we were actually doing as long as the kids were happy, safe, outside and NOT AT HOME, but their resistance to leaving made it difficult to get them to buy into the idea of doing anything that was COVID-Safe when the weather was cold.
One thing that helped was making a list of things that we could potentially do (go on a hike, make a fire and have lunch in the forest, go to a playground, go around a castle’s grounds, go on a scavenger hunt, play soccer, etc…), and I would get them to agree on what they wanted to do the next day, so that they would be ready for it mentally. The 1.5 year old would sometimes have a hard time understanding that we were talking about the future, and be devastated that we weren’t doing it right then.
I’m not a great planner, and so I often forgot to ask them in advance and we would need to decide what to do on the same day. I would show them the list, and leave it up to them to agree on something. If they couldn’t agree on something, I would decide for them, which they dreaded and provided an incentive for them to agree. If they wanted to stay home, that was only an option if they agreed on what they were going to do at home and played nicely. If, after all of that, we were staying home, I could always say “Alright kids, it’s time to go to a playground!” If it wasn’t going well, and they’d usually remember the deal ;)
These practices are still how I try to get the kids out of the house, but since school started up again in May, there are usually about 4 hours most days where the bigger kids aren’t home, and the littlest is always up for a bike ride or something.
What are your strategies for getting out of the house? How do you manage the needs of multiple kids when you’re all home all day long? What are your or your kids favorite things to do outside that are COVID Safe?
2022 UPDATE: In retrospect, I have very little experience with lockdowns relative to the extremely numerous American parents that dealt with school closures that exceeded a year - six weeks is nothing in comparison. American parents: do you have tips for long days at home, or how to encourage kids to go on long walks or nature adventures?