difficult part
writer Amir Niazi‘s monthly meditation is about the ups and downs of parenting and all the emotions in between.
Photo illustration: The Cut
About six months into my pregnancy with my second child, I contracted the coronavirus. With a fever of 105 degrees, I was shivering violently with chills and chattering my teeth loud enough to wake my sleeping husband.
It was late February 2020, and when I opened my eyes and felt better, I Googled my alarming fever temperature and panicked when it showed up as hallucinating and on the brink of brain damage. . I’ve read stories of nightmare pregnancies caused by COVID-19, where babies are delivered prematurely and isolated from their mothers for weeks. I kept thinking about my daughter, who was growing up in her sick body. “Will my daughter be okay? If both of us can overcome this disease, what kind of world will our daughter be born into?”
After 10 days, I gradually got better and all the ultrasounds and tests showed that the baby is healthy and growing well. A few months later, in May, she was born in the midst of lockdown and playground closures. Suddenly, I had a newborn and a toddler, and the four of us, including my husband, were stuck in a small apartment, trying to live, work, and grow despite the fear and anxiety and chaos in the world.
Now, somehow surprisingly, the baby just started attending kindergarten.
A recent study in the UK by the Center for Young People’s Life shows that, like my daughter, a significant proportion of children born at the beginning of the pandemic are actually not yet ready to go to school. Some children are not yet potty trained. Some people come to school with strollers and can’t concentrate on books, while others swipe and tap pages like they would on a tablet. This study made provocative headlines, influenced X, and people were furious, ranting about negligent parents.
I have to say it’s hard for me to understand why being home with a child for those few months would make potty training difficult. Surely it should be easier? This may not be true for everyone, but overall more people were working less from home?
— HTKC (@HTKC7) October 5, 2024
When I had kids, I didn’t have a solid start, but I did spend quality time with them. Before starting school, parents are their children’s main teachers and need to step up their parenting skills. Too many parents think schools will solve the bathroom problem, but it’s their job to do that.
— Claire Webb (@Bellydancerblue) October 5, 2024
Stop blaming coronavirus, enough is enough. Parents are responsible for their children. Many cultures and countries have socio-economic and traumatic issues to deal with, yet children are ready to attend school. Have pride and standards!
— Brent Poland (@BrentPoland1) October 4, 2024
Apparently, the idea that 4-year-olds may still struggle with language or be delayed in socialization stems from a “lack of standards.” Four-year-olds are often not allowed near other children for the first few years of their lives, and the lockdown has left them extremely isolated, cut off from friends and family in their most formative moments.
By the way, my 4 year old son is potty trained (had to go to toddler day care at 18 months old) and loves to jump in the stroller on long walks, but he can get around on his own. . But even if I hadn’t, would I have been a terrible parent for the past four years if I had given in to the demands of the stroller while trying to manage and negotiate everything I had to do? I don’t blame other parents if they make that choice.
Everything over the past four years has definitely left an indelible mark on me as a parent, if not completely. It’s easy for many people to erase what happened during that period from their minds, but having children, no matter their age, increases stress and fear about the pandemic. We were juggling full-time jobs, often in entirely new environments with greater expectations and supervision, and full-time childcare, which in my case included a playground, There were few of the tools normally available, such as drop-in centers and libraries. , gyms, community centers, daycares. These kids are all at home, desperate for attention and distraction, and we’re scrambling between work and caregiving while panicking that this virus is going to kill us, our parents, and our kids. I was switching to
Is it fair to say now that there’s potential trauma from that experience for parents that has changed the way we approach parenting a little bit? With the first child, there was space to focus on many of the finer points of early development, such as the more natural opportunities for growth that being around other people and children provides. In my daughter’s case, it was like all the lights suddenly went out and the entire family was left in a vacuum. The focus became survival. Just get through the day, week, and month. A lot got lost in the shuffle as I battled to maintain work and sanity while nursing a newborn and chasing after a toddler.
Like many parents at the time, I felt like my heart was about to break, but the feeling hasn’t completely gone away.
In September, the US Surgeon General warned that parental stress was becoming a serious health concern. According to the report, two-fifths of parents are so stressed that they are unable to function normally. It’s so stressful that they can’t do their job – it bears repeating.
“Parenting during a pandemic has felt very isolating, stressful and ‘high-stakes’. Every decision you make can have life-altering consequences for your child and those around you. “There’s a gender,” says Danielle Vermeer, a West Coast mother who also has experience raising children. Her daughter has just started kindergarten, but she says she loves it so far and is adjusting well. But Vermeer believes that “with the Surgeon General saying that parental stress is an urgent public health issue, it is clear that the effects of the last four years are now beginning to be felt.”
Christine, a mother from Toronto, had a child in April 2020. Her daughter has had no contact with anyone other than her parents due to the lockdown, but “surprisingly, she has always had a hard time adjusting to new people and new situations,” she said. Christine found it very difficult to raise a child in that atmosphere and struggled with the lack of outside connections and help. A few years later, she had a son, and she says the difference in parenting was “night and day.”
What it’s been like to raise a child during a pandemic, how it felt like a primal cry, how difficult it is to juggle both a career and caregiving at the same time, and especially how mothers are especially neglected. I’ve written a lot about. No one cared about us when they posted about their new hobby or their shitty bread. We continue to drown, but our lifelines have never been extended.
It’s easy to ridicule our parents’ failures or criticize those of us who seem to have overlooked it, but trying to manage it all while the scars of the past few years are still fresh and the blood continues to flow. It is much more difficult to maintain empathy for what is needed. I often worry that my son’s handwriting is lagging behind his peers because I wasn’t able to work with him to learn the basics before he started kindergarten in 2021. Remember what was going on in the world right before your son started school, and try to forgive yourself for some of the things that have slipped through the cracks. We were bleaching grocery bags and making sure our elderly parents would survive the winter, so penmanship wasn’t a top priority.
Now, the exact cost of those years, hellish years, is becoming clear. Parenting itself has become a health issue. Before you pull out your digital pitchfork, let’s draw a line from the problem to the root cause.
Connecting the dots, it’s no surprise that parents feel paralyzed and unable to function under stress. We didn’t have the time, space, or support to recover from the effects of the past few years. Instead of scoffing at how pandemic babies are ill-prepared for school, why not consider how we got here in the first place?
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