by Jennifer Hickey, Postdoctoral Fellow

 

I reach for my fourth cup of coffee as I hunch over the laptop, my eyes never leaving the screen as my three-year-old son wiggles onto my lap and begins pressing the keys. The number keys are his favorite. My research notes and drafts are now interspersed with random numbers, like some sort of mysterious code. Perhaps my editors will later decode them as an SOS, a cry for help that echoes throughout the homes of working parents everywhere as we try to embrace this new normal.

Yes, working from home with a preschooler is hard. But I’m one of the “lucky” ones. I only have to keep my child clothed, fed, and entertained without help from his nanny or our family and friends. I have not yet been thrust into the sudden role of secondary educator. Many of the parents I know (let’s be realistic – many of the mothers I know) are now expected to somehow remain employed while helping their children navigate digital learning and filling in for the many other functions performed by schools, such as providing meals and opportunities for social engagement. Mothers of children who are not able to successfully engage with a digital platform must somehow find the time and energy to become home educators. Mothers whose school districts insist on in-person instruction despite alarming rates of virus transmission are forced to become home educators if they are uncomfortable with the risk of exposure.

This pandemic has imposed differing levels of hardship on every parent. But we all have one thing in common. We have been forced to navigate pandemic parenting through an endless series of difficult individual choices. Our government has consistently refused to take decisive action to curb the devastating effects of COVID-19, leaving us to choose the correct course of action to slow viral transmission while keeping the economy “open” to put food on the table in absence of a meaningful social safety net. And the state has provided little uniform or non-politicized public health guidance to aid in making these choices. Rather than acknowledge the extreme burden of this imposed decision-making, the state hides behind the notion of individual choice as the ultimate goal, justifying further abdication of responsibility.

     Let me be clear. On the best of days, the sheer volume of high-stakes decisions required to parent a small child is mentally and emotionally exhausting. And every choice seems to carry potentially fatal consequences. Will I delay his development if I let him watch an extra hour of TV? Will he wander into the road if I run inside for two minutes to grab his water bottle? Will he grow up to be less social if I let him play alone? Will he never be independent if I play with him too often? While sometimes helpful, social media provides an endless stream of recommendations and warnings that further complicate decision-making. Suddenly the most benign tasks, such as making your child a snack, can be fraught with danger. Thanks in no small part to the celebration of individual choice in parenting, I was completely unprepared as a new mother to handle the mental load of making thousands of choices a day, informed by a never-ending stream of confusing and conflicting data and opinion from a variety of sources. This is parenting on a good day.

Enter the pandemic. Suddenly the stakes are even higher. Government abandonment and proliferation of opinion on social media combine to increase the choices parents are forced to make. And there are no “good” choices. Many parents must now decide between exposing their family (and their child’s educators) to a potentially deadly virus by sending their child to school or risking unemployment because they cannot realistically hold a job and homeschool at the same time. They must decide if the benefits of seeing family and friends (including childcare) outweigh the risks of potentially infecting loved ones. I have personally had to decide between accommodating my autistic child’s sensory needs by allowing him to use outdoor playgrounds and see his occupational therapist or keeping him safer inside while he suffers very real harm from under-stimulation. I have chosen to delay the start of preschool and not allow him to see his beloved grandparents despite the loss of crucial social interaction. No matter what we choose, we will be wracked with guilt and concern over the outcome. The consequences could be fatal. The mental and emotional toll will certainly be devastating. I see nothing to celebrate about a state that forces its citizens to make these decisions without providing even a hint of consistent guidance or support. 

Yet I am fortunate to be so unconstrained in my ability to choose. For many, choice is simply a fiction. Physical, economic, and social factors dictate the availability of food, caregivers, bonding time, and so much more. These parents also suffer severe guilt and anxiety over the potential consequences of their limited decisions in the face of a deadly virus. Not only has the state failed to provide these families with basic support, its rhetoric of individual choice serves to increase the emotional harm to parents who feel their unfortunate situation is a result of their “bad” choices.

This pandemic has laid bare our universal vulnerability and forced us to focus on our most basic survival needs. It has exposed the devastating physical and emotional harm caused by state neglect and the profound inequality of individual choice. Left to my own devices, I choose to hold my son tighter and let him type whatever he wants, grateful that we are healthy and safe. Like all parents, I attempt to remain hopeful for his future. I imagine a world in which we’ve heeded this pandemic wake-up call and fashioned a more responsive state, one that properly values human life and frees us from the burden of literal life-or-death choices. I hit delete. I take another sip of coffee.