Tips and Strategies for Peaceful Parenting during COVID-19
I want to share with you a few tips to manage the combined challenges of raising children, social distancing, and social isolation.
Tips and Useful Strategies
Lighten up on demands.
Part of raising kids is to teach healthy habits and values. In doing so, we make reasonable demands upon them. These habits and values are important but now may be a time to ease up a bit. I hear you if you are saying to yourself that if you do not stay strict, your child will become a slacker who sits around all day. Consider balancing that concern with the value or priority of managing isolation and maintaining harmony in circumstances that can be difficult for everyone staying at home.
Manage your own stress.
First, to maintain your own sanity. Also, stress of a parent often gets passed on to the child and makes everyone a bit more on edge and reactive than they otherwise might be. Carve out time for yourself. Go a bit easier on yourself in terms of your responsibilities around the house. Don't shoot for pristine right now. Stress management is key for you and for the vibe in your home.
Connect with others.
Connect with family and friends regularly though FaceTime or Zoom. (If you are in the Enlightened CoParenting course I encourage you to connect with others in the course in our private Facebook group and during our Thursday evening Zoom calls). Do things with others online such as painting, enjoying a smoothie, watching a movie together (split screen to see the movie and the other people watching with you).
Do light exercises with your child.
The goals: shared activity and togetherness, not more ambitious goals like getting in shape or losing weight. Be light and have fun. The positive effects last much longer than the 15 minutes of the activity. The effects bring positive energy to the tone of life in quarantine.
Remember the power of observational learning.
You have great influence as a model in relation to the present home situation. You are showing your child how to handle the situation and what to do under difficult circumstances. Children pick up ways of responding, styles, and reactions from the people around them without thinking about it or with knowing they are learning something. How you react to the news, to the situation, to the challenges of social isolation all make a huge difference in how your child thinks, feels, and reacts. Your reactions serve as a template for your child.
Not-the-usual story time.
Take time each day to share a happy, fun story from the past. Take turns sharing a memory. Ask the storyteller to describe the memory in detail:
What is the best memory, family experience, time with a friend?
What exactly did the person like?
Go through photos from a prior vacation or prior experience where the children can see past photos of themselves.
Novel and new activities.
With your child, learn something interesting each day. Try to pick a topic that can be explored for more than one day to develop interest and to encourage deeper learning. Let your child be involved in selecting the topic, but give a menu of options to guide and help.
Choose a positive theme;
Choose the same time on a given day when you do this— structure is important.
Use a search engine or short videos and poke around the topic for about 15 or 20 minutes together.
Make this fun and informative for both of you.
Encourage your child to talk and take any lead, the more, the better.
Try to do this each day but take a day or two off and try not to exceed your child’s or your attention span.
Other ideas:
Doing something creative.
Example: Dress up as best as you can in makeshift costumes from a movie or book. The strength of this as a positive experience is for both the parent(s) and child(ren) to be involved. Have dinner “in costume” and maybe even make the menu to match.
Routines and Rituals.
Research suggests that routines and rituals have a calming effect on life at home. This is why we focus on rituals so much in Enlightened CoParenting.
I do not mean structure all moments and activities. Make some things regularly scheduled. This structure will create a positive supportive effect in your relationship and your child’s behavior.
There is a balance—a few structured routines and rituals are great; structuring the entire day is as likely to cause more problems.
Good Routines:
Meals,
Bed time,
Time for internet, TV,
Play
Parallel play
(You are both in the same room or place but working on different activities. Just being together is very helpful for the home vibe.)
Private time:
Private time is usually independent activities not in the presence of others. They give person away time. Call it a recess. Alone time is fine and even constructive.
Affectionate physical contact.
Provide more physical contact than usual. Affection (verbal and nonverbal) are comforting and helpful emotionally and biologically.
Monitor your child for signs of anxiety and depression
Signs of anxiety and depression in children can be subtle. Unless they are extreme, they often do not look different from having a bad day.
When looking for warning signs consider asking:
Does my child worry a lot and talk about the worries more than usual?
Is he or she having sleep problems?
Does my child sit around and essentially do nothing?”
Are there departures from usual patterns of eating, mood shifts not easily explained, or instances in which the problem (anxiety, depression) seems to be immobilizing your child?
These reactions are readily explained by the isolation (from school, peers, activities, and the full range of rituals from getting dressed in the morning through returning home from school).
We are all struck and influenced by the changes so only think about consultation if there is an extreme situation.
Adolescents
All the above apply to adolescents but with age adjustments. Private time is likely not to be a problem. Research shows that even with all that time away, teens need (and want) family time more than ever. When selecting or doing activities, it would be great to have the adolescent take the lead on selecting options. If there is a shared activity online, not only have the adolescent select which one, but have him or her teach you or the family something. Place the adolescent in a role that leads rather than follows.
Hope this was helpful. and that you and your family remain well.
All My Best,
Jodi
P.S. I’ve got an exciting update. We will be launching the Enlightened CoParenting Course once more in 2021.
It will improve your life in significant ways!
Sign up to be on the waiting list and be the first to get the news of when we open the course by clicking the button below.
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