I love the reflection that psychologist F. Morelli makes about COVID-19 in the newspaper “El Mundo”, especially with regard to families: “I believe that the universe has its way of restoring the balance of things according to its own laws, when these are altered. The coronavirus forces us to close schools and drives us to look for alternative solutions, to reunite dad and mom with their children. It forces us to be a family again.”

In an increasingly frenetic world where we all run all day, taking things for granted and believing that we control time, suddenly, this stop arrives, a completely new situation for us, full of uncertainty and restrictions that can increase every day. However, we can get something very positive out of all this, using this time to enjoy family.

How much time do you usually spend with your children doing pleasant things? The time we dedicate to our children’s childhood is crucial for their education and the transmission of values. Parents are your greatest point of reference. They form their personality using our words and actions as a framework. They learn from us. After a study carried out by Nora Kurtin with more than 3,400 parents with the aim of finding out how much time we spend each day with them, it was found that in their first 12 years of life we ​​spend around 27,980 hours, or, which is the same, 3 years 2 months and 9 days. That is, an average of about 3 hours per day from Monday to Friday. Maybe in your case it is a little more, but in reality it is very little time, especially considering that we probably spend most of it on tasks such as taking them to and from school or extracurricular activities, doing homework… Excessive obligations (work, household chores, social activities…) turn us into hyperbusy people whose time slips through our fingers.

So, let’s welcome this lockdown period to spend quality time with our family, and what does quality time mean? It means mindfulness time. That is, sharing moments, conversations, tasks or activities with them where our children are active and feel listened to.

Likewise, let’s help our children understand what is happening; They are exposed to a lot of information that their minds cannot process and this can cause anxiety and fear, so I propose some tips that could be useful: convey information appropriate to their age, provide some basic hygiene guidelines to help them manage the situation, reassure them by explaining that in our cities there are people such as health workers and security forces who will work to guarantee our health and safety, and if possible, avoid exposing them to the media. And let’s not forget that we are models of behavior for our children as parents and as children.