We took away children’s schools, sports, plays, orchestras, and Boy Scouts. Then, we told them they couldn’t play with their friends. Then, we closed the playgrounds, removed the hoops from the basketball courts, and, then, called the cops when they started playing soccer.
In other words, we made childhood lame. And it turned out this really affected parents and children.
Echelon Insights polled parents weekly from April through June, asking about their feelings, needs, fears, and hopes.
It turns out the things they were most worried about — even as unemployment soared, schools placed time-consuming demands on parents, and many had to work from home — was keeping their children occupied.
Kristen Soltis Anderson of Echelon Insights laid out the findings during a presentation at the American Enterprise Institute on Monday.
The top tier of parents’ worries, this poll found, included getting the coronavirus and children losing out on education and social interactions. About 60% of parents worried about these things, with some variation over the eight weeks studied. If you look closely at the numbers, the biggest concern, beating out academics and the coronavirus by a slim margin most weeks, was generally “your kids missing important social interactions at school or with friends.” (See the slides at around 3:50 of this presentation.)
Around 30% of parents said their children felt lonely or anxious during the lockdown. “Anxious” and “exhausted” were the most common emotions parents reported during the lockdown, with parents of younger children feeling much more exhausted than parents of older children.
While these negative feelings were common, most parents leaned toward keeping schools closed out of safety concerns, and this was especially true among black and Hispanic parents.
It’s not surprising that loneliness and keeping children occupied would be parents’ top concerns. Children need play, they need friends, they need activities. Parents, especially parents cut off from their community, simply cannot provide all of that for children. It takes a village to raise a child.
Parents were forced to plop their children in front of TVs or video games much more than they would have wanted in order to get work done, at home or outside of the home, and parents were constantly barraged with cries of “I’m bored” if they didn’t simply plug their children in to some device.
Politicians and public health experts will focus on just the risk of infection and the economic effects, but parents say that the emotional effects of being cut off from the community are just about their biggest concerns.
