Answering work emails and calls, making sure children do their school work, and then preparing meals and running the house is an invitation to domestic insanity. Balance: television and tablet yet, children more or less. And work? We do what we can.
While still digesting the announcement of schools closing, parents immediately started getting a blow to their nerves with the pings, dings and toings telling them to download onto their computers and phones all the applications and platforms needed to work remotely, and reminders of the need to keep children connected to school, running on a regular schedule, with regular work schemes. “I just wanted to yell - Stop! Let us adapt to the new habits and demands before you start demanding the usual pace for work and study, like nothing’s happening”, shares Sofia Ferreira, a trained psychologist working as a public servant.
A mother of two, aged 9 and 5, working from home along with her husband, Sofia still hasn’t managed to upload the platform her oldest daughter’s teacher picked to stay connected to students, let alone starting to do her work. “I felt mired with apps and chats and explanatory texts on how to manage tasks, routines, schedules, as if it all has to be normal when it’s different. Stop! Our brain is still managing the fear and anguish this situation brings. We need to have a catharsis”, she then adds that with life suddenly reduced to the domestic environment, wanting to maintain normality could even be counterproductive. “We are locked at home and it’s not normal for us to only be able to go out wearing masks, or to keep a 4m distance from others. The situation isn’t normal. And this all happened under a week ago. So give us time to adapt”, she pleads to schools and employers.
“I feel I’m coming short, both as a mother and a professional”, says Luísa Moura, mother of two. Actually, answering work emails and calls, and getting trigonometry questions in the middle or questions on the constituents of a river while ensuring the meals and the house are taken care of, has been an invitation to domestic insanity for many parents. For Luísa Moura, 37, and a university teacher working from home along with her husband and two children, (9 and nearly 4), chaos is always just around the corner. “It’s insane. What saves me is my balcony”, she says. “I’m preparing myself and preparing the tools I need to be able to teach remotely, or else the students will lose a year. But none of this is easy, because my son always needs attention. He doesn’t want to be alone, he misses his grandparents, and on top of that he feels scared. It’s a victory to get him to play on his own for half an hour”, she describes. The result: television became omnipresent. “Many times screens are the only way to keep them entertained. It’s impossible to want to keep the rules we had before”, she admits. Between her oldest daughter’s school work and her son wanting attention, the meals and the efforts to keep running the house, work requests have taken a back seat. “Nothing, zero, I can’t do it”. And the barrage of advice on how to keep rules and order in the midst of chaos only makes her feel more guilty. “I feel I’m always coming short. As a mother and as a professional”, Luísa Moura adds.
You can’t create a “new normal” where you put a tabula rasa over the previous rules and hand out a free pass to use screens, because that will be hard to turn back later on.
Mário Cordeiro, pediatrician
Free pass for screens
At the start of the week The New York Times had an article for parents with the title “Just give them the screens (for now)”. Pediatrician Mário Cordeiro tells Público things shouldn’t go so far. “We have to moderate screen exposure, even if rules are more loose than normal. If you think screens need to be more present, you can’t create a new normal where you put a tabula rasa over the previous rules and hand out a free pass to use screens, because that will be hard to turn back later on”, he says, advising parents to find diversified activities. “Even while looking at a screen, you can alternate between games, research, visits to museums, general knowledge, music, etc”, he says, suggesting a daily schedule to avoid a monotonous repetition of days, which would unavoidably “bring frustration, tantrums and arguments”.
For Mafalda Estudante, the “worst part” of this pandemic has been combining remote work with her children’s school work. “We’ve only got one computer at home, so I have to interrupt my work for them to do their school work. Teachers email homework assignments, and just for History, my youngest son, who’s 10, got 10 pages of questions to be answered this week”. She also says that in her oldest son’s (13) class, “the science teacher sent a worksheet to replace a test they were having, telling students they’d be penalized if they didn’t turn it in by Monday”. Conclusion: “ They’re creating unnecessary stress at a time when everyone feels trapped”.
The homework overload and the impossibility to get them ready as fast as required has kept the phone ringing at the National Confederation of Parent Associations. Its president, Jorge Ascensão, reminds the goal isn’t for parents to replace teachers. “While parents work remotely, they can’t keep track of their children’s homework. Some have to keep a normal schedule, as if they were in the office. On the other hand, parents aren’t always equipped to help children in every subject”. In an ideal scenario, “teacher would remain available to answer student questions, like in a classroom”.
Paulo Morais guarantees it’s possible. But this math teacher, (45), working from home with two children, (9 and 6), recognizes the first day wasn’t positive. “There were so many requests, I even felt emotionally imbalanced”. The trick was to talk to his children about how to organize their day-to-day. “We turned the living room into our ‘base of operations’. Each one of us has a work area. I’m at the head of the table with my children on the sides. We made a board with post-it notes where we define everyone’s schedules and tasks. They helped define the tasks”, he says. Everyone in this family gets clearly assigned tasks. “While I do the dishes, one of the kids dries them and the other puts them away”, all on time for play and even sports. “We have a static bike where we do our sports class, but we also do yoga and karate”, says Paulo Morais, adding that each kid makes a drawing about what they did at the end of the day. Even so, last Tuesday they weren’t able to do what they’d planned. “We were all in a bad mood. Looking back we realize we spent too much time watching tv, where everyone talked about coronavirus, and the next day we decided all screens and social networks would be disconnected and only used for work. We’ve even turned off the Playstation”. So the idea is to manage insanity. To try to prevent the avalanche of news on covid-19, Disney Junior and tantrums from becoming the home’s soundtrack. And learning to deal with tools like Google Classroom, Jitsi Meet, or any other fancier tool to help children stay connected to their teachers and classmates. “We, parents and teachers, are learning to operate in this new reality.The goal is to combine everything, but we know it won’t be easy for anyone”, says Jorge Ascensão. Sofia Ferreira guarantees she’ll get there, but she’ll need time. “Trying to stop children from making a mess at home or from getting glued to the screens, and then forcing them to work as if nothing were happening is like trying to get them off the swimming pool on the first day of holiday. It’s not worth it”.