Our Children's "Behavior" as we Navigate Distancing

“The Virus is ruining everything!” — My 7-year-old daughter

In the past few weeks I’ve heard it said in sadness, grief, anger, frustration, disappointment. The other night I heard it with a combination of all of these emotions at the same time in what was truly an epic meltdown. “The Virus is ruining everything!” I could feel the grief of all of the losses, the disappointment with all of the “no’s”, the anger and frustration with all of the limits, the fear that this will never end.

Emotions have been running high since life started to change for us, which began several weeks ago. My husband is a physician, so he saw it coming, so we started to prepare a little early. The kids and I had what I knew were our last fun outings to the indoor trampoline park and the indoor play space, and our last playdates. Our family had our last trip to church and what had become a tradition of breakfast with friends afterwards.

As adults, my husband and I knew what we were doing. We were filling our, and our daughters’, cups as full as we possibly could, hoping that full cups would provide a little time to adjust to whatever new normal we found ourselves in. We knew the distancing was coming, we prepared ourselves as best we could. We did what we could to explain things to our kids, but they could never have imagined the situation in which they now find themselves. How could they? They’re 5 and 7 years old.

In some ways, it’s going well. My kids are busy and engaged much of the day in “school at home”, thanks to the wonderful support of our school community. They do get outside to play in the yard or to scooter or bike around the block, they play together and work on projects like forts and lego creations, and we come together as a family every night for dinner and a movie. There are some really nice moments throughout the day.

Of course there are lots of other moments that really aren’t going so well. My kids resist “school at home”, I imagine for a lot of reasons: it’s not “real school,” it’s happening at home, mom is their “teacher,” and at home they’re supposed to play. They’re amped up with all the tension and anxiety in the air and all the cooped-up-ness, so they’re often running around wild, arguing with me, or fighting with each other, or wrestling, or screaming or something else loud and unmanageable. It can be a lot.

It’s tempting to see their “behavior” as simply that, behavior. We want to redirect it, change it, fix it…so we threaten, punish…anything to just make it stop. I’ve fallen into that trap on occasion—on occasion meaning multiple times every day. It’s hard not to. At baseline, this kind of noise and activity and “behavior” would trigger most parents. We are not at baseline, however. We parents are carrying around our own stress and tension and angst, so we are heightened. Our patience is more limited, our balance and equilibrium strained, our tempers harder to control. We do need to be gentle with ourselves and forgiving of our tough moments. Or days.

We also, however, need to re-interpret our children’s “behavior.” Let’s be honest, all they are really doing is outwardly demonstrating what we are all feeling internally. They’re just better at showing it because they simply don’t have the controls we have developed over the years, nor do they have the “coping” mechanisms we have. They may not be finding that walk or run we suggest to be something they can embrace as therapeutic. They can’t pour a drink, log into a Zoom happy hour with friends, binge watch a HBO or Netflix series they’ve been dying to watch. If they’re lucky, we’re giving them a little extra screen time, much of it educational most likely, and some of it fun.

Let’s again be honest, even with these coping mechanisms we have at our disposal, are we really great at staying positive and keeping our cool right now? Probably not. I know most days I’m ready to scream at the top of my lungs by mid-day. Can I really fault my kids for actually doing it? Not really. I think I’m just jealous.

At the end of the day, our kids are just little versions of us, dealing with the same things we are dealing with and not appreciating. They aren’t acting out because they’re turning into difficult kids with bad behaviors. They’re not running with the wrong crowd (well, right now mine might be…I’m not sure I’m the ideal crowd for them every moment of the day). They aren’t developing bad habits that we simply must break before they end up in juvie.

They are simply having an absolutely normal response to a terribly abnormal situation. Same as us.

So rather than try to avoid, redirect or squash the emotional displays, accept and even embrace them. I write this as much for my own benefit as I do for yours, because this is my parenting lesson during this time. Think about what you want and crave during this time: connection, kindness, understanding, empathy, hugs/holding, reassurances that it will be ok, someone to just sit and listen, someone to just sit with your and not judge while you’re having a moment or at your worst. Give your kids the gift of this.

Resist the urge to react when they start to lose it and just be with them. Let them have their emotional reaction, reassure them that these are just feelings and that they are normal feelings about what is going on. Validate their feelings and the reasons they are having them. Hold them while the storm passes. And when things are calm, use this as a teaching moment because there are huge life lessons in this situation.

Life is hard sometimes, let’s start there. How many of you have had lives devoid of hard times? This is hard, yes, and hard in a way that is new to us. But perhaps not harder than some other times some of us have had, and perhaps not as hard as others. As my daughter and I talked that evening of the epic meltdown, we talked about how life is sometimes just hard, and that the hard time can last for a while. We talked about how as hard as it is, we are strong and can handle it, even during those times we think we can’t.

Everything is impermanent. This is a hard time, but I have lived long enough to have experienced quite a few hard times. I’ve learned that no hard time lasts forever, that hard times come and go. So it will be with this hard time, it will go and an easier one will be behind it. That will be followed by another hard time, which will be followed by another easy time, and so on. That is life.

Even in the hard time, we can find peace, joy, and even fun. It may not be what we imagined, or even what we want to do in any given moment, but if we shift our viewpoint and our expectations, we can also shift how we feel about where we are right now. We can appreciate a relaxing bath and the wonderful smell of essential oils or bubble bath in the water. We can find time to spend doing something we don’t typically have time to do together. We can snuggle more and use the highly-coveted technological devices more liberally to have video calls with friends and more frequent movie nights. Even in the hard time, there are moments that aren’t so hard.

And finally, we have what we need to get through this. We are strong, we are flexible and adaptable, and we are resilient. We are also together, both within our own family and within the larger world outside. We as humans are all depending on each other right now, we are truly interdependent, and what we are doing right now is not only helping us but also helping a lot of other people out there who need our help. This is part of being human and being part of the human collective. We will do our part, we will survive the hard times, and we will make it.

We may end up with a generation of extremely resilient kids, and perhaps that is the silver lining in all of this.