How are you holding up so far?
I’d love to offer you some tips based on all the people I’ve helped overcome pandemics over the years or a list of best practices based on accumulated research and data of parents who’ve gone through self isolation with their family for weeks and months.
None of that exists of course.
We’re all figuring this out as we go. I’m treading water just like you. So far, I’ve had moments of anxiety and sleepless nights, fear and denial as well as some surprisingly joyful experiences being home with my kids acting as teacher/parent/lplaymate. To keep me on my toes, they’ve been good about giving me occasional meltdowns to manage as well. Our lives are drastically different from just 2 weeks ago. I’m now working from home full time doing telehealth sessions and partnering with my wife Mariah to provide the right balance of structure and flexibility for our 11 and 7 year-old.
Below you’ll find thoughts and suggestions that I hope you find helpful.
- A lot of us are still in the “honey moon” phase of this. As this goes on, I anticipate that it will tax us emotionally and increasingly activate our anxiety. As a result, I think it’s super important that we’re starting now to work on building up our coping skills and improving our strategies for support and navigating distress.
- This is a unique opportunity to strengthen our family relationships and get to know one another better. While this may be one of the hardest things we’ve gone through as individuals or as a family, that also means that this has the potential to be one of the most growth enhancing experiences we’ve had as well.
- I’ve found myself reminding young adults and older teens that staying isolated isn’t about protecting you but about the community, specifically your grandparents and other older and more medically fragile people. The death rate among older and medically fragile people is much higher than the regular flu. An important moment to put others ahead of ourselves.
- One way to cope with this is to remind ourselves that what we’re doing is bigger than us and about supporting the larger community. Having a sense of purpose for our suffering makes it much more manageable.
- Emotions are never wrong. We all have the right to feel scared, sad, angry, hopeless, happy, or anything else. Give yourself and your child some time to have a pity party, empathize with them, yourself and your partner if you have one.
- After that, it’s on to positive thinking and gratitude. You may be in a better situation and have more privilege than many or most. Perhaps it’s the size of your house, a loving and safe family, financial security, high speed internet, lots of devices. Those of us fortunate in any of these ways, let’s be sure we don’t take it for granted.
- We’re all going to be doing a LOT of screen time so focus on two types of balance:
- Balance between being on screens and off (although this will likely be skewed more towards being on).
- Balance between how screens are being used: Watching videos, gaming, working together with others, creating stuff, communicating with others, and learning are all different (but sometimes overlapping) and important ways to be online.
- We all have certain basic needs to be happy:
Play.
Social connection/meaningful relationships.
Being in service of something bigger than ourselves.
Physical activity.
Sleep.
Focused attention and learning.
In some ways, the conditions are not great for this. In other ways we couldn’t be in a better position to focus on the things that really matter to our happiness and well being. Our greatest tools right now are connection, flexibility and problem solving (in that order). Let’s stick together and remember that we’re not alone.
