Paul Hopkins: Who’d be a parent in the time of coronavirus ...
First came the closure of schools and then child-care facilities, and then home-schooling, followed by many summer camps and such never opening, and now we head into unknown and untested territory as schools reopen in this time of coronavirus.
Many parents are completely depleted — mentally and financially. Typically, our politicians revel in rhetoric about parents' fears about the plausibility of social distancing in school being no more than fear for your child up on a trampoline.
Parking the pandemic for a moment, today's parents believe parenting is harder than 20 years ago, and research shows anxieties arise from the complex relationship between technology, child development and the internet's trove of unseemly content.
There are the arguments that when my generation was rearing children in the '80s there was a recession, unemployment was high, and interest rates at one time were up at 16% making the monthly mortgage a mammoth undertaking. Young couples today bringing up children certainly don't have such interest rates, salaries are proportionately and relatively better, and Irish society now secular and arguably more tolerant.
Parents of all generations have always had a tough time. They are the providers of an entire human being's subsistence. They keep that person fed, clothed, and clean behind their ears. They help them learn and invest in their education, their experiences, their futures. They help them navigate social life in their early years, and they do all this, I would contend, with limited time and resources, while simultaneously balancing their own lives and jobs.
Add to that a barrage of reminders that they can always spend more money, dedicate more time, or just plain do better, and it's no wonder psychologists worry about parental burn-out. The daily phone-ins on RTE's Liveline are testament to this, never more so than in living with the pandemic.
But is parenting harder today than it was, say, 20 or 30 years ago? According to the global think-tank Pew Research Centre, a majority of parents believe the answer is yes. While a lack of discipline, a disrespectful generation, and the changing moral landscape are cited in their reasoning, the most common complaint is the impact of technology and social media.
Concern comes not only from the ubiquity of screens in their children's lives but the well-publicised relationship between screen-time and the development of their little ones. Arguments abound that too much screen time can lead to sleep problems, lower grades, weight problems, mood problems, poor self-image and bullying, and the unfounded fear of missing out — to name a few.
The benefits parents bestow on a society are perhaps incalculable. Families with children are the elemental unit of a society, the reproductive cell; without healthy families, the entire enterprise begins to become unstuck, as it were.
The pandemic has hugely magnified the lot of parents, what with issues of home-schooling, back to school fears, children with special needs, sick children needing urgent care, children with exams or college around the corner; parents, the providers, who have lost their jobs, whose futures are uncertain, unknown. Listen to Liveline, with its finger on the pulse of a nation, and listen to parents who are suffering, with seemingly little relief in sight.
I am a parent to three grown-up, wonderful and well-adjusted kids, but I am no expert on the matter — what parent is? To drive a car or own a dog, you need a licence but to be a parent demands no such criteria. However, this I do know: Children are expensive to raise, society needs healthy children and families, and, therefore, families — especially low-income families, who are more likely to experience instability and its attendant ills of child poverty, during a pandemic or not — deserve care and looking after, and adequate financial support. As a purported grown-up, just and fair society, can we honestly say that is the case?
I don't think so, and those who pour out their hearts daily to Liveline concur.
Our Constitution demands that we treat all children — and by extension all parents and guardians — equally. As a nation, as a society, as a people we fall short on that count. Fall short on matters of adequate school buildings, adequate creche facilities, adequate student accommodation and adequate understanding and treatment of juggling parents in the workplace.
Talk to Joe? We need a good talking to ourselves, and, more pertinently, to the politicians and all who claim to run the show.