How a Parent in Nashville Found Ways to Support Her Young Children
For this story, we interviewed a 33-year-old parent in Nashville. She, along with her husband, have sorting through how to provide social emotional support for their 4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son through the pandemic.
In the beginning, we signed up the kids with ABC Mouse, which is a little young for my daughter.
But my daughter did it for a little bit. They have incentives where you can earn tickets for doing different activities. It’s preschool through age eight or so. They have things for learning how to count, and learning the alphabet. Kids can earn tickets so they can buy like outfits for their avatar, or fake animals.
After COVID happened, they added other learning videos. Now that’s all they do is watch the same videos over again, instead of doing the actual learning activities. My older was in it for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then got bored with it. It’s not free. They had a deal for about $45 for the year and you can have up to three kids on the same account.
I started to get a little worried for her staying on course with learning since preschool.
Over the summer I started looking at my options. A local preschool teacher has a curriculum that she shared with me. But the prep work was just so much just for a day-to-day basis to keep up the activities.
In August or September we waited a few weeks after schools had started just to kind of see what would happen. We decided that our oldest needed interaction with other kids, and so we put her back in Kids on the Korner preschool. It’s two days a week. I think there’s five or six kids in her class. They take their temperature at the door but there’s no masks or anything. We chose that over the other preschool with the regular preschool with the school system. But it was going to be five days a week, and we’d have to drive 15 minutes to go pick her up and drop her off. Whereas Kids on the Korner is five minutes away. And they’re going to wear masks all day. In the beginning, it was only going to be kindergarten and preschool through like second grade in the building; the classes were going to be spread apart. Then I found out that was just for like a week and a half, and then they brought everyone back. It seemed like more of a risk to have her around all of the elementary school. The smaller class size seemed safer.
We call it the virus. I tell her we need to keep our distance from people and wash our hands, and not touch our face. Whenever we go somewhere we we wash our hands when we come back. I can’t let them eat snacks when we’re out because then they’re touching things and then it’s going their mouth.
I feel like its all I can do. I didn’t take my youngest with me places, and I still try not to because he doesn’t understand. He’ll touch things and put his hands in his mouth.
I wasn’t ever really scared by COVID, but I was confused. I was concerned about getting accurate information. It took me quite a while to form my opinion on it.
The biggest thing was her not being able to see her friends. It was not really anxiety, but just loneliness.
There were no resources that entertained her long-term. None of the computer things caught their attention long enough. The hardest thing for my daughter was not being able to see her friends, and so eventually we did. We went to Thanksgiving with a few friends; they have four kids. One is my daughter’s age and one is my son’s age. We made them our circle since they didn’t go see other people we didn’t see other people. This way my daughter could have interactions with other children her age.
You need to have your circle of friends with whom you can continue some kind of normalcy.
Earlier this year I made a mask to look like a cat face. She goes, “Oh my gosh, I love it.” This felt more fun, and it makes it much less scary. People at the store stop and will say things like, “How cute!” It’s like playing dress up — not protecting them from a virus.
