Train for a Mars mission: how to survive social distancing while working from home with your kids around without losing your sanity
(Initially, this was a Facebook post. When my American friends started resharing it even though it was in Polish — apparently it translates fine — I decided to write an English version.)
SARS-CoV-2 is still at large, and the responsible thing to do is practicing social distancing: that seems the best strategy to flatten the curve. In Poland, the government introduced a state of emergency on March 13, 2020. No international trains or air travel, big stores are closed, no gatherings bigger than 50 people. It’s supposed to last 10 days, but we’ll see how the situation develops. Whoever can should work from home. Schools and preschools are closed.
If you are a parent, and your kids are in preschool or early primary school the last two sentences together probably made you pause. I’ve been working from home for years, and I assure you it can be great, but only under the assumption that you do not have a bored 6-year old around. With children, it becomes… challenging.
My family had a bit of head start when it comes to social distancing. We had gone skiing to Italy, and while the situation was fine when we got there, it became a lot less fine by March 1, when we got home. Our preschool had sent an email asking families who had been in affected countries to keep their children at home, and of course we complied. By the time school got canceled nationally, we’d been staying at home for two weeks already. After those two weeks I have a few thoughts and observations that I would like to share.
This isn’t business as usual. Normally, when you have your kids at home, it means that it’s a vacation, weekend, or they are sick. That means that either they have your full attention, or they are lower energy than usual. Not this time: they will be full of energy and you’ll have to focus on other things.
Prepare for the long haul. At the moment, the state of emergency is set to last 10 days, but I am afraid this isn’t enough for the problem to go away. It may be prolonged, even more than once. In China it was a few weeks, and they were capable of deploying some draconian measures, which a lot of governments would prefer to avoid. Normal solutions: watching TV, LEGO, playing computer games — they all get old pretty quickly. When children get bored, they begin to act up, which in turn pisses off the parents, who are already on edge due to the pandemic. This is a recipe for a vicious circle — and you won’t really have a chance to take a break from each other.
You have to work. This isn’t a vacation. No, you can’t spend the day baking cookies, playing with LEGO bricks, doing papier-mâché sculptures, drawing with your child (some of the “helpful” suggestions from Facebook). These are all fun activities, but very hard to combine with writing code, doing research, or writing a report. And no, the fact that you need to keep doing your adult things when the world is a bit crazy doesn’t make you a bad parent. The stock market has just crashed, and there’s a recession looming. We should be grateful if we can work from home. It’s our duty to be productive and to keep the economy going.
So, what can you do?
Reframe the situation. Hiding in a bunker from a virus is not fun or glamorous. But you know what’s kinda similar, but super exciting? A mission to Mars! Would you go to Mars? Damn right I would, and so would my son. But a trip to Mars would take around 7 months, which is (hopefully) longer than we’ll be practicing social distancing, and isolation is a big component of it. So for my family this is an exercise, part of training for a Mission to Mars.
You can keep learning stuff even if school is canceled. Nothing keeps young brains busy like some good old education. Our son does math exercises, and watches educational videos on YouTube. Crash Course Kids is excellent, to the point that my son chooses it over his regular cartoons when he is not in “study mode”. SciShow Kids is also great. After each episode, he has to tell us what it was about, and draw a related picture — this is important to keep it an active learning process (passive things get boring more quickly). Scratch programming is amazing, and their tutorials are high quality. Once Upon a Time… Life is on Netflix, and it has episodes that are actually relevant to what’s going on.
Create a routine. It’s fine to mope around on a weekend, you’ve earned it. Again, this is not a long weekend. Waking up at regular hours, dressing up, adding some structure to your day — all this helps with boredom. In my family, most of the day is for productive activity, and only the evening for entertainment. It’s fine to play some Minecraft or watch some Netflix cartoons, but that with moderation.
A healthy mind in a healthy body. This applies in equal measure to adults and to kids. While practicing social distancing, we spend a lot of time home, we walk a lot less, gyms, swimming pools, stadiums, etc. are closed, and playgrounds are suspect. Dropping significantly on your levels of physical activity just can’t be good, even from your immune systems perspective. Luckily, you can keep being active at home, without any equipment. Body weight exercises are great for you, and probably safer than a lot of stuff you do at the gym. What is more, most of them are suitable for even very young children (don’t let the fact that your daughter can do more good form push ups hurt your pride, daddy!). For tips, you can google “prison workout,” or take a look at Mark Lauren’s You Are Your Own Gym, of which I am a big fan of (he also has an app with videos if the pictures in the book are not enough for you to understand the exercise). As long as you aren’t under quarantine, you can go running (as long as you do it by yourself). If you get under quarantine, cardio is a bit trickier, but still doable. You can jump rope, or simply do a few quick series of burpees (actually, it seems there’s few things burpees aren’t good for). Another thing that you can do is yoga — there’s plenty of classes on YouTube. My personal favorite is Yoga with Adriene. My plan is that we have some physical activity as a family at least a few times per week.
Technology to the rescue. Feelings of isolation can bring you down, and this applies not only to adults. Your kid also misses his friends from preschool. Today we are planning for our son to play Battleship over Zoom with his friend from preschool.
Grandparents are not welcome. This differs from culture to culture, but in Poland at least grandparents play a big role in raising their grandkids. When we moved back to Poland, the fact that my mother in law was in the same city was probably the single greatest factor that improved our quality of life. With the schools closed, grandma or grandpa will probably want to help you out. However, this is the time when you have to say no to them. Social distancing requires that we avoid people who aren’t in the same unit with respect to contagion (that is, they don’t live under the same roof). To make it worse, mortality rates for Covid-19 greatly increases with age. For people under 40 it’s 0.2%, 1 to 500, not much worse than the flu. For people who are 60–70 years old, it’s 3.6%, 1 to 28. If you are over 70, it’s 8%, 1 to 12.5. So, yeah, if grandma came to help with the kids you’d definitely be able to do that teleconference in peace. However, that conference is not worth increasing grandma’s risk that she’s gonna die. At the same time, if grandma can do Skype or Zoom, she can help a lot — she can read a book, tell a story, play a game… It’s not the same as being physically in the same place, but it’s better than nothing.
Talk to your kids about what’s going on. The adults are all freaking out (in Poland it seems like the virus is the only thing people talk about), and children are overhearing their conversations. They can also be confused and stressed out. Explain to them what’s going on, why it is a big deal, and what can you do to help. Compliance with procedures like hand washing or not touching your face is much easier if you understand why you have to do it. A nice thing to do is to explain how detergents work, and that SARS-CoV-2 has a lipid envelope — which makes soap super effective. And you yourself may learn something interesting in the process.
We are gonna be (mostly) fine. Even if, as a society, we need to take some drastic measures, we are much better equipped to cope with it than we were even 20 years ago. This can be a comfortable quarantine. We have YouTube, Netflix, Zoom. Almost everyone has the Internet in their phone. A lot more people can work from home. Don’t worry about toilet paper shortages — retailers are not stupid, and they also read the news. There’s money to be made in an economy that is not great anymore. If my local grocery store is representative at all, all around the world shop clerks are stacking pyramids of toilet paper, with a gleam of pride in their eyes.
