Five Lockdown Parenting Rules To Save You From War With Your Kid

Well, here we go again. More lockdown. I would say I’m surprised but I’m not, I don’t think many of you are either. If you couldn’t see this coming you were probably looking in the wrong direction.

That being said, what has emotionally caught a lot of us off guard is a sudden, bombshell realisation.

“I’m going to be locked in the house with the kids again.”

Dreading being with your children will be an abhorrent thought to some of you. I know for a fact those of you who can’t believe I’d view time with my child as a negative share a common trait- you’re not parents.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but I’m going to anyway. Lockdown with children was hard. Not hard in the sense that parenting naturally is hard. It was hard in a way that defies explanation.

In the past, as a dementia carer, there was one week I worked well over 75 hours. Seven days in a row where my company was predominantly people with advanced dementia. I soldiered through.

Lockdown, though? Weeks trapped indoors with a 3 year old who can’t see any friends, relatives, play on the swings, go swimming, be at his nursery, broke me.

Not irreparably, but enough that I had the thought ‘I am not strong enough to do this’ on several occasions. I think every parent did. I am aware is sounds selfish and has undertones of hashtag First World Problems, but none of us signed up for this.

“Hold on Tom, are you saying you hate your kid?!”

Certainly not. Lockdown has built some of the happiest memories I’ve had of parenthood so far. However, this didn’t happen until my wife and I sat down, hashed it out, and hacked the situation.

We cracked Lockdown parenting. We went from having a demon that drove us to despair to a tiny ball of wonder and curiosity that made not lounging around in our underwear like our childless compatriots worth it.

Enough waffling though. Here are five rules of Lockdown parenting that have been tried and tested on an unruly toddler by yours truly (a parent, like you).

5- Screen Time? Psh

This first rule is one that has got me a lot of flack from other parents when they hear it.

“You can’t let them spend all day playing games!”

Cool your jets there, Irene*. I fully agree with you in non-lockdown situations. Go outside and play, children, whilst it’s still socially acceptable for you to run around carefree. Frolic before frolicking becomes frowned upon.

This was my mantra circa 2019.

In 2020 though, where are the kids supposed to go? Where are they supposed to frolic? Frolicking is a social activity. All of those experiences we think they’re missing out on by trading real play for virtual play just aren’t there.

Your kids have already had most of what they love denied to them. Don’t add extended Minecraft sessions to that list.

4- Kids Enjoy Learning

Make teaching your kids part of your daily activities. Some of you may doubt this, but some of the times my son were at his most content were when I was trying to teach him some reading or maths.

Children are going to be looking to their parents for stability and security during all of this (duh). Any time spent with them that’s calm, where you’re focused on something, is going to do their nerves a world of good.

Teaching a child to read is one of the most focused activities you can do with them. It requires both of you to participate with 100% of your attention. Ignore the age old idiom that kids think learning is boring- Bart Simpson is a fictional character.

Obviously, for older kids, replace reading and counting with whatever is appropriate for their age range. My son has loved learning about history with me.

It doesn’t even matter if they get what you teach them. That’s not the goal (although it’s a nice bonus). The goal is to create calm. If you’re relaxed enough to spend time teaching them, they’ll be secure enough to relax.

3- They Need To Know Some Stuff

The second part of this rule is ‘but not all of it’. Don’t lie to your children and tell them everything will be fine if you don’t know that. Conversely, don’t overload them with information they’re never going to understand but will still scare the hell out of them.

Here’s the thing- they know when you’re lying to them, and lying to them about how much trouble is afoot will scare them more than the trouble itself.

You don’t have to tell them about the amount of people that have died if they’re not old enough to look up that information for themselves. Tell them about what’s going on, but don’t transmit every morbid detail the media throws at us. Try and restrict watching the news around your kids as much as possible.

To my boy, three at the time, 50,000 was a number so huge that he couldn’t comprehend it. I know this for a fact because I once told him I was going to make him eat 50,000 bananas.

He comprehends death to a degree, enough to make him sad at least and enough to be afraid of dying.

No way was I going to tell him that possibly as many as 50,000 people may die. All he would do is panic.

What he does need to know is that lots of people are getting sick. If he can’t see Nanny and Grangrand there needs to be a good reason. “We don’t want to make them sick by accident” is good enough reason for a three/four year old. “Because they may die if they get the disease that has killed thousands of people so far” is way more than he needs to know.

2- Be Engaged (Even Though It’s Tiring)

If you’ve ever been to see a physiotherapist about muscular pain, you’ll understand the kind of weird reverse-psychology voodoo at play here. You’re sitting there, in pain, unable to move, and the physio has the gall to tell you that the solution is to move more.

Strangely (well, not strangely, it’s science) it does work. You move through the pain, and soon enough the pain subsides.

The same applies here. Your kids are draining all of your energy. They’re going mad with boredom, and you’re going mad along with them. Surely the solution can’t be to be more engaged with your kids?

Wrong. Here’s a nugget of wisdom that I’m amazed it took me four years to work out- kids can get tired of us, too.

As soon as I actively made my son spend one on one time where we were both undistracted by screens (Cbeebies turned off for once, my phone unchecked for hours at a time) his attitude changed.

He uttered a phrase I never thought I’d hear from him- “Daddy, I don’t want to play anymore, I just want to rest on the sofa”.

1- Always Remember, It’s Harder For Kids Than It Is For Us

This is rule number one because it’s the most important, by a long stretch. Such a long stretch that by the time you get to it, the preceding rules are distant marks on the horizon.

Covid19 has been the most overwhelming thing that has happened in most of our lifetimes. We’re quite lucky in the West like that, especially in the UK. This is the first time in my memory that global events led the society around me to grind to a halt.

Here’s the thing- I’m an adult. I understood why. I’m cognitively developed enough to grasp the nuances of the situation, what words and phrases like ‘pandemic’ and ‘death toll’ mean.

I understood it, and still there were times it got the better of me. Imagine how scary all that would be if you didn’t understand it. Moreover, if you couldn’t understand it.

Kids are in an unfortunate position. They know something is happening, they’re scared by it, they can see we’re scared by it, but they don’t understand what it is or why.

I’ve lost count now of the amount of apparently motiveless tantrums that, after careful calm questioning, my boy professed to stem from anger or frustration about ‘the sickness’.

Emotions define our behaviour. We are expected to keep them in check. It’s one of the many reasons mental health struggles are called struggles- there are few shames greater than knowing you’ve potentially lost a friendship, partner, or job, because of your emotions reaching extremes.

Children don’t have that capacity. Covid19 doesn’t excuse bad behaviour, but it explains a hell of a lot of it. If you didn’t have your knowledge of your own feelings, if you didn’t understand your emotions as only experience can show you how, you’d be lashing out a lot more in 2020.

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So those are my rules. All that’s left for me to say to you fellow parents is this: good luck, god speed, see you on the other side, and remember that you can make the journey enjoyable.

*Irene isn’t a real person, I didn’t want to upset anybody.