The Pandemic Parenting Degree of Difficulty Scale
Aaron Sharp | February 16, 2021
A while back I had a small post about the different kind of difficulties we’ve encountered parenting in a pandemic. The last few days we’ve added a new item to the list so here is an updated Pandemic Parenting Degree of Difficulty Chart.
Some words of Explanation:
Parenting is the baseline. Pre-pandemic we had 4 kids, 3 of which homeschooled, 2 full-time jobs. We also write on the side (latest book release You Got This, Dad), the Wonder Woman also tutors a class for our Classical Conversations campus, and we also have a few other things going on. In short, things were a little crazy before this.
That was before…
Parenting in a pandemic. We’ve been fortunate. We’ve had to make all the pandemic life changes. We haven’t been to a zoo in a year, we rarely go out in public, and we’ve cancelled most of our external family activities. But we’ve had our health, we’ve gotten to keep our jobs, and we’ve gotten to be together as a family.
Then we decided to…
Parenting in a pandemic while doing home renovations. Yes, we did this, and we may need our heads examined. A home refinance plus stimulus checks meant that something we had been talking about doing at some point was possible. We replaced floors, repainted, moved an island, and a bunch of other things. At one point all six of us were basically living in our master bedroom while renovations went on around us. Six people working, going to school, and doing most of their lives in one room seemed like the hardest thing we would do in this pandemic period.
But our perspective changed when…
Parenting in a pandemic while mom and dad have Covid so they have to quarantine with the kids AND from the kids. This made everything that came before seem like a walk in the park. We were fortunate in that neither of us was seriously ill. We didn’t feel good, but we were operational for the most part. We stayed in the bedroom, the kids had the rest of the house and we masked up whenever we needed to fix a meal for them, change a diaper, or kiss a boo-boo. This quarantine was the longest 10 days of my life.
Now we’ve added…
Parenting in a pandemic during a freak winter storm with rolling blackouts. Given everything that has happened over the last 12 months this might seem strange to say, but having the power go on and off may be the most surreal thing to happen. I’ve just taken for granted things like heat, lights, internet access, streaming media, and being able to get in the car and drive somewhere when I needed to. Now we are on day two of power outages that may continue for a few more days. We sit here without power doing homework, and entertaining ourselves, then the power comes on and people rush to make coffee, microwave a snack, get some work done, check the news and weather, go to the bathroom with the lights on, and charge their devices. Even more than the pandemic this feels like an alternate universe because once the power goes back out we know nothing of the outside world. The roads are icy so we aren’t going anywhere, and for all I know there is a zombie apocalypse in Nebraska right now. Murder hornets could have rebranded as homicide bugs and attacked Idaho, and I would be none the wiser.