Will experiencing lockdown change our children forever?
Written by Claire Burgess, Family Consultant
In these strange and surreal times, we have been, and still are, facing things that we have never faced before in our lifetimes. Many families have experienced an extremely difficult time in relation to living and working space, finances and family circumstances etc and this is likely to continue as we start to go into some kind of ‘recovery phase’.
We just wanted to take a moment to look at all of the things we are hearing from families about their experiences through the Coronavirus outbreak and what these changes might mean for us and, more importantly, our children, as we come out of it and into our ‘new normal’ - will this experience change our children forever?
Being able to have regular Family mealtimes together has been something that so many families have spoken about as being one of the biggest changes to their normal every day. Normally we are rushing to clubs, groups or getting back from work, nursery and school and then going out again to afterschool activities. It can often mean several sittings for mealtimes to meet the different requirements of each family member. Sitting at the table, eating a meal together is something that happens possibly for 1 or 2 nights a week in normal times for a lot of families, but during lockdown it became a daily occurrence and with many people still working from home and clubs not properly back, it still is! The importance of family mealtimes can often be underestimated; it can help with children eating more, trying new things and also for everyone to have a conversation about what happened in their day and how they are feeling about it.
So, did lockdown encourage us to ‘go back to basics’? Our busy lives often mean that we are having to condense playtime or activities into little windows such as after school or at weekends. However, during lockdown we had more time and played games together, being creative with the toys and equipment that we have around the home, and doing things like baking, preparing meals and even things like washing the car with our littles ones rather than driving to the car wash! The ‘back to basics’ activities can often be the ones our children enjoy the most as they involve being with us! We also realised that we don’t need to go out all the time! We can all be guilty of planning weekends so that they are full and we are not ‘stuck at home’ with nothing to do. Staying at home for many would be stressful because of fear of missing out (and still might be at times now) and we feel that we need to get out and about to do things, but this experience may have made us realise that every day doesn’t need to be filled with activities we have to go out to do.
At the moment, many parents are still based at home and so are getting to experience the nicer parts of the day when children are not feeling hungry or tired (or both!), rather than what is often that ‘witching hour’ when it is the mad rush to get dinner done, bath times and bedtimes. It also means that children are getting to experience times with parents! Developing a sense of family and realising the importance of those we have around us but also those who we take for granted has been something all of us have been thinking about. Our children have seen adults looking out for each other, people telling others how they feel (often we don’t do this!) and showing what it is to care about each other. We have all gained a greater appreciation and sense of community. Our children have learnt about keyworkers and having an appreciation for those people who are often forgotten such as postmen, refuse collectors and shop workers. These people often feature in ‘people who help us’ projects at school and nursery but can we now expect our children to have a greater, first-hand experience of how these people help us and how important they are. In addition to this our children are learning about what it means to look out for our elders and those who are vulnerable.
There are also quite a few new skills that both we and our children have learnt and developed such as:
Experiencing boredom! When we are bored it is often when we are most creative and our children will find things to do that they might not normally do. However it has to be recognised that boredom can be difficult for some when experiencing anxiety and so may need to have some support in finding things to keep themselves busy.
Developing tolerance. As we have been spending so much more time in each other’s company with limited distractions we have needed to take some deep breaths, do some counting to 10 and have empathy for the others around us and what they might be experiencing.
Resilience might be something that has been and still is being developed more than we could have ever have been able to teach our child without Coronavirus. Being able to experience difficulty and challenge alongside their family will help children to realise that they can bounce back and that can also help to develop their problem solving skills.
Imagination! Often when working with parents I will hear that they aren’t imaginative and struggle to come up with ideas to entertain the children. However we have seen that parents and children have found that they have so much more imagination than they first thought and with oodles of activity ideas and other content on social media we have never been more well equipped with information to help spark our imagination!
We often have a negative approach when it comes to our children using technology but in these times technology has enabled us to stay connected not only for work purposes but also with friends and family. There actually appears to be an increase in communication which has seen people being able to remain connected and in touch.
We have all had to find ways to make this situation work for us with parents working from home, children home schooling, getting the food shop done etc and all of this has been about enhancing those problem solving skills too. There are families who will be finding this whole situation challenging because of not being able to work for example and needing to budget and be resourceful. This again is something that can be invaluable to our children in learning that there is a need to be careful with money, that we can make do with things that we have and that we don’t need to have new things all the time. In fact often we have things in and around the house that we haven’t used or remembered that we had! Will we all come out of this with enhanced life skills? Will this be the generation of children who will have a greater understanding of life skills such as cooking, baking, cleaning, laundry etc. These are skills that we have seen lacking in some of the generations, but could this experience bring those skills back and make them much more self-sufficient in the long term? We certainly hope so!
While you are here why not check out our video guides on various topics including behaviour, sleep, teens and tweens and more - for information - click here.
Don’t forget that we offer parent consultations should you need support with anything from sleep to behaviour and so much more! Details of the packages we offer can be found here.
We also have a podcast - ‘Newborn to Teen and Everything in Between’ - listen here.