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If it seemed like kids didn’t have much to say about their school day before the pandemic hit, it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re not interested in discussing their day now. Before, they used to actually leave the house several days a week! They used to go into a different structure, separate from your home, …Read more...

I was struck the other day by the most basic pre-pandemic desire: I wish I could go out to eat with my husband and son. It’s not that I miss the food that much—we’ve gotten a lot of takeout and dined outdoors a few times before winter hit. It’s that I miss the spontaneity, the ease with which we used to make those…Read more...

Parenting kids through different ages and stages doesn’t really get easier or harder; it just gets different. There are challenges to each age our kids enter, and often those challenges are vastly different from the age that came before it—but there’s something special about parenting a teenager. We remember our own…Read more...

For many of us, what began in mid-March as a two-week “remote learning” nightmare slowly but steadily morphed into a months-long experiment in keeping our children progressing in school while staying at home. Sometimes I like to think back on those early weeks—how naive we were; how hard we thought those first days…Read more...

The other day, my 10-year-old said something that broke my heart a bit: “This pandemic has taken all of our holiday traditions away from us.” Maybe it hasn’t taken all of our traditions, but it certainly has taken a lot of them. We couldn’t travel to see my family for Thanksgiving. The large Christmas party my in-laws…Read more...

Do you remember when a snow day would feel like such an inconvenience? HowEVER will I work with these children underfoot all DAY, you moaned to yourself. Imagine if someone had told us way back in 2019 that it could be worse—you could have what amounted to a year’s worth of snow days, made all the worse by a little…Read more...

Although the pandemic has sought to affect as many aspects of our lives as possible, we’ve also gotten pretty good at finding virtual workarounds for all the things we are missing out on—including, now, visits with Santa.Read more...

Over the summer, when it became clear that my 10-year-old son’s school district was going to offer both face-to-face and virtual options for returning to school in the fall, his mom and I wanted him to feel like he had input into whatever decision was made. Read more...

Setting reasonable rules and boundaries, which you then enforce consistently, is the cornerstone of good parenting. On the other hand, life is tedious right now. It’s all dark and dreary and distanced, and we could use a little fun. Which is why it might be time to bend your own rules a bit.Read more...

Your kids might be concerned about Santa’s annual trip around the world this year—and rightfully so. We’ve just spent months explaining why they can’t go to school, gymnastics class, summer camp, their friend’s house, grandma’s house, or anywhere else, really. You’ve told them why you won’t be traveling to visit…Read more...

Thanksgiving is a bit of a weird holiday for me. When I was growing up, and all through college, it involved having the same meal every year at my grandparents’ house. But after college, when I moved across the country for a job at a newspaper, things got wonky. That first year, I worked on Thanksgiving—covering local…Read more...

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our kids’ teachers have been through a lot this year. Sure, we all have been through a lot, but these people are warriors. They’re Zooming with 20 fidgety, distracted first graders every single day for hours on end. Or they’re putting their own health at risk to teach our kids in…Read more...

This year has been full of sacrifices and impossible choices, but it’s not quite done with us yet. If you have kids who are away at college, you may now be facing the pandemic’s latest conundrum: Do you have them come home and risk everybody infecting each other, or do you tell them to stay put and ride out the…Read more...

The pandemic has taken so much from us—but do you know what it doesn’t have to take? Our kid’s awkwardly posed school pictures (complete with traditional blue or grey background), that’s what.Read more...

It’s interesting how much we used to talk about the need for work-life balance, back when things were actually kind of balanced. Sure, many of us were stressed and spread thin in pre-pandemic times, but there was a set time for work and a time for family and a time for self-care, even if it felt like one of those…Read more...

I wrote a post yesterday about the “COVID slide”—the concern among many parents that our kids will fall behind (or more behind) academically during all these months of virtual learning. The truth is that this year has been hell for parents and their children who have been isolated from their friends and trying to…Read more...

This pandemic has provided parents with a grab-bag of things to worry about on any given day. There’s the obvious concern about our children (or ourselves, or their grandparents) actually contracting the virus. There is the toll that isolation may be taking on their mental health. The lack of in-person connection to…Read more...

There has been a lot written recently about the deep isolation that so many parents feel, especially those who are working full-time from home with children who are also learning from home. I’ve avoided clicking on most of these pieces because it seemed futile to dwell on it. Of course we’re isolated, and it felt like…Read more...