A Letter to Parents of School-Aged Children...

Since March, we parents have been trying to balance the impossible load of work, home, and disease awareness and prevention, all while trying to support our kids through a curriculum we don’t understand using an unfamiliar platform.

This school year will be a mix of in-person and distance learning for most families. If we observe what is happening in states that have already opened their schools, it looks more than likely that the year will likely be spent fully remote at some point. We have been told that there will be new tools and programs to make the distance learning part of the hybrid model more effective, but we have no idea when we will know what those tools are. Even if our kids go in-person, we hear rumors about plexiglass partitions, distance in the hallways, and uncollected assignments to prevent viral spread, any or none of which could be true.

We are more hopelessly unprepared to prepare our children for school than we have ever been before. Back-to-school sales have been going on for weeks, but we don’t know if we should fill the cart with PJ’s and a laptop, or new outfits for picture days.

Oh, parents.

It’s been said, but let me say it again: this anxiety is overwhelming, uncomfortable, and has been going on for SO LONG that it is numbing us to the point that it is hard to parent the way we want.

We know we are modeling resilience in a time of crisis, but even the strongest need a break sometimes. So, be sure to take a break. We can’t pour from an empty cup, and we can’t care for others when we are not feeling cared for.

Connect with friends. We need our networks to stay strong, especially now with so many disruptions. And please reserve judgement. No one has lived through times like these before. We all want what is best for our kids and for our families. These decisions are an impossible calculus without all of the information, and none of us have all the information.

We are all doing the best we can.

Good luck to all of us! ❤️