The coronavirus forces us to be a family again
I love the reflection that the psychologist F. Morelli makes about COVID-19 in the newspaper “El Mundo,” especially regarding families: “I believe the universe has its way of restoring balance to things according to its own laws, when these are disrupted. The coronavirus forces schools to close and pushes us to seek alternative solutions, to bring dad and mom back alongside their children. It forces us to be a family again.”
In an increasingly frantic world where we all rush around all day, taking things for granted and believing we control time, suddenly, this stop comes, a completely new situation for us, filled with uncertainty and restrictions that may increase every day. However, we can take something very positive from all this, using this time to enjoy family.
How much time do you usually spend with your children doing enjoyable things? The time we dedicate to our children’s childhood is crucial for their education and the transmission of values. Parents are their major point of reference. They shape their personalities using our words and actions as a framework. They learn from us. After a study carried out by Nora Kurtin with more than 3400 parents aiming to find out how much time we spend with them each day, it was found that in their first 12 years of life we spend around 27,980 hours, or, in other words, 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 might be a bit more, but it is actually very little time, especially considering that we likely spend most of it on tasks such as taking to and from school or extracurricular activities, doing homework… The excess of obligations (work, household chores, social activities…) turns us into hyper-busy people from whom time slips through our fingers.
Thus, let us welcome this period of confinement to spend quality time with our family, and what does quality time mean? It means time of full attention. That is, sharing moments, conversations, tasks, or activities with them where our children are active and feel listened to.
Likewise, let us help our children understand what is happening; they are exposed to a lot of information that their minds cannot process, and this can cause them anxiety and fear, so I propose some tips that might 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 like healthcare workers and security forces who will work to ensure our health and safety, and as much as 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.
