Living With An Unwelcome Roommate: Parents’ Views

It’s been a rough year, starting with fires in Australia, the loss of a major basketball star, a pandemic that shook the world, to the fires in our own state of Oregon. With these drastic changes, we’ve all had to make adjustments. The biggest adjustment is making space in our lives to accommodate our new roommate, Covid-19. 

Our parents may not have to suffer through hours of schooling, but they are struggling to maintain their jobs and making sure their kids are staying up to date with school work. This may apply less to high schoolers and college students than other age groups, but even the older kids still need that push and reminder to stay caught up. It’s so easy for anyone to just close the computer and skip class, so it’s important to have our parents there to keep us on track and make sure we don’t fall prey to the many distractions at our fingertips. 

I wanted to talk to a few different parents that I know about what it’s like becoming the impromptu instructors of varying grades. Fortunately, I was able to talk to the mother of a highschooler, the mother of a middle schooler and kindergartener, and the father of two kids in elementary school. For the purpose of this article, the mother of the high schooler will be Parent A, the mother of the middle schooler and kindergartener will be Parent B, and the father will be Parent C. 

Time at our current state of life seems quite infinite with our days blending together and an endless repetitive routine. Talking with the parents I heard different ways they’ve learned to manage their time. For Parent A and C, they have currently adopted quite a flexible lifestyle, thus being able to at any point be there to help their kids with their learning. Parent A has a very adaptable job, so she is able to manipulate it to attend to helping her daughter manage her time. For her, it’s slightly easier to manage her daughter’s time, because high schoolers have a much more structured and independently led learning schedule. However, Parent C, unfortunately, has gained this ability by being one of the many who has lost their job during this difficult time. With having two young kids, he is in a constant state of chaos of juggling two different “classrooms.” The younger kids have shorter school days that normally range from 2 to 3 hours long, which means there is a lot of ensuring that each kid is attending their classes and keeping to their work. Parent B has a slightly different experience. In order to be home to maintain her own kids’ schedules, she’s had to switch her schedule from working the day shift to working the graveyard shift, which has put her at opposite shifts with her husband. Having her kindergartener and her middle schooler going at the same time has created a struggle to make sure they are both staying focused and on task. 

Managing time isn’t meant to cause your schedule to be consumed by school and work, so there needs to be time for parents and students alike to step away and relax. Parent A is an instructor at our local Jazzercise and is able to use that time as a way to have fun and bond with her daughter. They use that time to take a break from the chaos of their lives. For some, the day often becomes consumed by both work and learning, so often a quick five-minute break periodically is the only available break. Our Parent B is balancing both an 11-year-old, a 5 year old, and a young baby, so her days are often lacking breaks. However, she has found ways to make sure her kids are staying with their work, but also having time to have fun and new ways to socialize. Parent C is having a similar experience, where the constant repetition of days makes it hard to continue with daily chores. Despite this, he has managed to make time to have bonding time with his wife and his kids. 

Moreover socializing and maintaining relationships with peers is an important aspect of the development of kids of all age groups.  For students in higher grades, it’s common that we have already started making bonds and strong friendships, so it’s just a matter of finding safe and easy ways to stay connected. Parent A has allowed her daughter to have safe socially distanced gatherings where masks are required to keep those friendships going, but it’s hard to trust some days that we as high school students are going to recognize that it’s important to follow CDC guidelines. For Parent B’s older kid, her daughter, she has started opening up Zoom meetings with friends and Google Hangout messaging, too, so that her daughter can work on those bonds and keep up with friends. Unfortunately, our younger generation of students hasn’t had the same opportunity to build those friendships. For both Parents B and C, their younger children have no way to really make friends and have their socialization left to interactions with their close cousins, so they haven’t yet experienced an important part of their development and of school. In fact, this has detrimental effects on the kindergarteners, because it causes them to lose interest in school and leaves a bitter taste in their initial experience with school. 

It’s not just losing that peer interaction, but also for our younger generation, they’ve been so excited for school to start, and in their first year of school they have been met with constant disappointment. It’s hard for all these parents to witness the constant disappointment and struggle all of our students are facing on a daily basis. Therefore, it becomes difficult personally as a parent to find the encouragement to keep trying, but they are managing to keep their students going to the best of their abilities. 

The cons seem to outweigh the pros, but that doesn’t mean the pros are nonexistent. For Parent A, the biggest success would be seeing her daughter learning to accept change and how to handle it. Parent B has found success in managing to keep herself on track and her head on straight through all the difficult moments and tantrums that have come with mom being the teacher. She’s especially proud of how her kindergartener has gotten good at working through his school work. Parent C is exceptionally happy that this rough time has allowed him to develop strong and solid relationships with his children. He has also been able to enhance his communication skills with his kids. 

Before we get to more general quarantine experiences, each parent has an applaud, something they are proud of in regards to the learning environment. The applaud of Parent A is to all the teachers and staff, in which she says, “I realize there are plenty of issues, but this is a Herculean effort on everyone’s part and so far I am impressed that it had gone this well.” She isn’t the only one applauding their efforts, Parent B is super impressed with how quickly and effectively teachers are responding to their students’ emails. She understands how difficult it is to respond fast to every email with having multiple students, so she’s thoroughly impressed with the effort. Parent C applauds the effectiveness of having a consistent schedule for his kids and how that has allowed them to still feel a part of the school community. 

In general, how has quarantine been affecting our parents? For Parent A, she is just grateful that her household gets along well enough that they are able to operate well with all of them being home constantly. However, she acknowledges that being stuck in the same house constantly makes it difficult for everyone to find alone time, but they are managing to the best of their ability. Parent B says that yes, quarantine is hard, but for the situation, it is going pretty well. They have a lot of property that allows the children to be able to run around and get some of their bottled up energy. It’s not to say that they aren’t struggling, but they are able to make the best of their situation. Lastly, Parent C says that it’s been pretty tough on everyone and he personally has been struggling to find the motivation to keep up with daily chores when all the days are left inside and start blending together.

It’s been hard on everyone this year, and it’s important to remember that we are all struggling. Even our parents. We are all human and need to keep that in mind when we are stressing out. It’s important for us older kids to remind our parents that they are allowed to take a break and take care of themselves, even though it’s hard to acknowledge they aren’t invincible and aren’t immune to the stress that we are feeling.