Continuing to Make Decisions in the Time of COVID-19
“Should my kids go back to school?” was the pressing question we addressed during our very first Pandemic Parenting webinar. And unfortunately, many of us are back again asking ourselves the same or similar questions a year later. In-person, at home, or hybrid schooling? Masks or no masks? What is safe or necessary right now?
In this episode, Dr. Lindsay Malloy and Dr. Amanda Zelechoski revisit and update their August 2020 conversation about why making decisions during the pandemic has been so hard. Although the answers will be different for every family and we can’t tell you what the right decision is for you, there are several concepts, resources, and research studies in psychology that can help us navigate these tough, ongoing decisions.
Included in this episode about decision-making:
What is making it especially hard for parents to make decisions during the current pandemic?
What are decision fatigue and mental load?
Are there any tangible tips or strategies that parents can use to try to combat decision fatigue and the cognitive load, and make these big decisions feel more approachable?
Meet Our Moderator
Ruth Speidel, Ph.D.
Ruth received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Notre Dame, and is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Tina Malti at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her work focuses on early family processes, including emotion socialization behaviors during parent-child interactions and their implications for child emotion and self-regulation, particularly within adverse family environments and in the context of early trauma. In addition, she is interested in how research can be applied to inform interventions aimed at ameliorating negative developmental trajectories in children and families who experience adversity.
Full Audio Transcript
[THEME MUSIC UNDER INTRO]
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Can you say... “This is Dr. Amanda Zelechoski.”
Child 1: Why do we have to?
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Just try it!
Child 1: I can't.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Deep breath
Child 2: [Laughter] This is Dr. Amanda Zelechoski.
Child 3: [Yelling] Lindsay Malloy! Ah!
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Wait, say Doctor Lindsay Malloy.
Child 3: [Yelling] Dr. Lindsay Malloy!
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: [Laughing] No, come back!
Child 4: This is Dr. Lindsay Malloy.
Child 2: Welcome to the [unintelligible] Parenting Podcast (laugher).
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: [Laughter].
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: One more time.
Child 4: And then after that can I have a candy?
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: [Laughing] No.
Child 4: Please, Mommy!
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Okay, ready?
Child 4: The Pandemic Parenting Podcast!
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Excellent!
[MUSIC INTERLUDE]
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Welcome to the Pandemic Parenting Podcast. I'm Dr. Amanda Zelechoski.
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: And I'm Dr. Lindsay Malloy. We are two psychologists, scholars, and moms, and together we co-founded Pandemic Parenting.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: We're here to share science-based research and help all who care for kids navigate this challenging time together.
[MUSIC INTERLUDE]
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Please note that the information contained in this podcast and on the Pandemic Parenting website are intended for educational purposes only. Nothing discussed in this podcast or provided on the website are intended to be a substitute for professional psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
No doctor-patient relationship is formed between the hosts or guests of this podcast and listeners. If you need the qualified advice of a mental health or medical provider, we encourage you to seek one in your area.
[MUSIC ENDS]
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: “Should my kids go back to school?” was the pressing question we addressed during our very first pandemic parenting webinar, and unfortunately, many of us are back again asking ourselves the same question a year later. Things like should our kids go to school in person or stick with homeschooling? Figure out some kind of hybrid solution? Should they be masked and will we send them with masks? Even if their school doesn't require masks?
Well, the answers may be different for every family, and we certainly understand that, and we can't tell you what the right decision is for you and your family. But there are several concepts, resources, studies in psychology that can help us as parents navigate these very tough decisions.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Yeah, and so to help you make decisions for your family, we're returning to the conversation that Lindsay and I had on August 6, 2020, a year ago. Over a year ago now. Which I can't believe we're still having to have this conversation, but we did feel like you know what? It might be really helpful to revisit that as people are continuing to have to make these decisions. So in that conversation you know we discussed why making decisions during the pandemic has been so hard.
The audio you're going to hear in this conversation came from a live webinar we hosted with Doctor Ruth Speidel, who is a developmental psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. We explained in that conversation how decision fatigue and cognitive load impact our decision-making skills and we talked through a lot of different steps of risk, benefit type decision making.
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: And so while we've had many important new developments since this webinar, like vaccines like more research on how the virus spreads and we have all, fortunately, or unfortunately, had an additional year of parenting in a pandemic under our belts, still, the concepts and approaches to decision making that we discussed. In this webinar are tools that I find myself using regularly, even you know over a year later.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Yeah I think we keep coming back to this. It's a year later, like that's really hard for me to stomach that we're still, you know, doing this and so one of the things that I know we want, we really acknowledged in that conversation a year ago, and it's even more important to acknowledge now, is how fatigued we are by this like decision fatigue is a real thing.
You'll hear us explain and talk about what that is and what the psychological science says about it. But we're exhausted, you know, we continue to have to make these decisions for our families and for ourselves, without very clear guidelines. Again over a year and a half of doing this, so I'm just sort of curious for you, Lindsay. Before we dive into that conversation, what is it like for you now a year later, continuing to have to be making all these decisions?
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Yeah, I think for me it's sort of some of the worst deja vu I've ever experienced in my life because I'm seeing you know I'm part of a lot of different online forums for parents, and I am seeing the same questions and the same concerns come up in those forums and people are asking for advice and people are overloaded with these decisions. Once again, we didn't think we would have to be making it for a second school year in a row, but here we are and for me I've, you know, I'm very tired, I'm exhausted by it all.
We've reached a sort of breaking point in several ways with childcare, and there have been some decisions that, in a sense, have been sort of taken out of our hands because we didn't really have a choice. And in some ways, that's more stressful and in other ways, it's a little bit of a relief because you know you have to do what you have to do. So yeah, what about you? What has been the decision-making process? And yeah.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: I think one of the things that I keep trying to remember is you know, which again, you'll hear us talk about in this conversation and breakdown. More specifically, you know the idea that decisions don't have to be permanent. You know we can, we can revisit things as we need to, as things change as it makes sense to different members of our family. So that's been helpful, but I've also been really frustrated and exhausted at kind of continuing at this pace. The sort of chronicity of the level of decision making, and, you know, quite frankly, worry we have that goes along with those decisions that's just emotionally exhausting. And so I've just noticed in myself sort of strange little things I've been doing to try to reduce the number of decisions I have to make.
I find myself having to make so many decisions for my family or in conversation, you know, with my spouse about what makes sense for our family like this ongoing dialogue is very exhausting, so trying to find ways in my own life to reduce decisions that I don't even consciously realize I'm doing. So, one of the things I've noticed, for example, is a big stress reliever for me is to just go for walks or runs when I can sneak that in 1/2 hour here or there and I used to really love doing that. In these, you know, trails or woods or different paths, and I have found myself gravitating in the last year to this, you know, sort of track by my house. It's like a big circle. It's pretty boring. And that's where I always find myself going, and I thought that's so strange, I just keep walking around and around, but I realize it's because I don't have the cognitive bandwidth right now to make decisions, like silly little decisions. Like should I turn right or left right now, while I'm walking. Or you know, should I turn around and go home now? Have I gone too far?
To be able to just reduce in my life that cognitive process of making those little decisions has actually been helpful when I can find relief to just go around and around in a circle which frees my mind to just relax, listen to music, listen to a book on tape or whatever. It's actually been really helpful so that has shown me there are other ways in my life to really minimize decisions, reduce the amount of decisions I'm having to make each day so that I can spend more of my emotional energy on the big decision?
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Book on tape. You've definitely just dated us.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Did I say that? [laughs]
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: It's all good, but I mean I think that's such a great metaphor. For you know, what this feels like anyway? Just going around and around in circles and you know it sort of feels like that for the last however long we've been at this now. So, we hope that some of the resources that we talked about and shared and tips in this original discussion we had. We definitely think they're still useful, and we still come back to them ourselves.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Yeah, absolutely. So you'll find links to lots of decision-making resources in the show notes and on our website. Which is www.pandemic-parent.org, so we hope that you find lots of helpful suggestions, and if you know more important than anything else, reassurance that you're not alone in this decision fatigue especially over a year and a half of experiencing it. So let's revisit that conversation about making decisions in the time of COVID-19.
Dr. Ruth Speidel: What is making it especially hard for parents to make decisions right now during the current pandemic? And are there any concepts from psychology that might be relevant to difficulties that families might be facing right now?
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Yeah, I don't know about the rest of you, but this is exhausting. This has felt exhausting for me from the first moment for a variety of reasons. I mean it's physically exhausting. But it's just emotionally taxing, and part of the reason we think that is happening is because all day long, every day there's just so much we're having to decide.
And for me, it felt like on a day-to-day basis. Once I realized my kids were going to be home all day, I was still having to work from home. My husband was still having to work from home and we were having to facilitate our children's remote learning. I was triaging constantly, like, it felt like every 10 minutes, what's the thing I have to do right now? Like what is the fire to put out right now? I couldn't think in the way that I usually could and I just started having a really hard time making decisions. They felt paralyzing, even simple decisions.
So this is a concept known as decision fatigue. It's a term that was originally coined by social psychologist Roy Baumeister, and essentially it's a deterioration of our ability to make good decisions or weariness after a long period of decision making and basically, you know when we are traumatized, which I think Lindsay and I, we both argue that this is a type of collective trauma we're experiencing right now at different levels, but when we're traumatized or at a minimum experiencing extreme stress, we lose our ability to generate creative solutions.
It's hard to decide even the very simple things that we're used to deciding, so we're seeing parents and friends of ours all over social media and in our, you know, group text with fellow parents, friends, I'm using words like drained, paralyzed, blocked like we can't make simple decisions about things like what should I make for dinner? What should I do next? I have this long To-Do List to have my kids do their e-learning first or their, you know, 57 hours of screen time that it's probably going to turn into today. Like how do we just make these choices that we're used to doing so?
Things like tackling work tasks can bring us to tears. They certainly did for me. You know it was like, well, I just can't figure out what to do. There's somebody interrupting me constantly. I can't even triage what I need to do. So if you are also experiencing this kind of fatigue, we just want you to know that you're not alone and there is the psychological concept to it. Blame it that you're taxed in these really difficult and complex ways, and our brains and levels of concentration just can't handle it. And so that's one piece of it. Is this fatigue at making decisions.
Dr. Ruth Speidel: Lindsay, what do you think? Are there any particular concepts from psychology that come to mind when thinking about decision fatigue and decision-making processes that parents, they're going through right now?
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Yeah, so I've been thinking a lot myself about cognitive load or mental load as the term is sometimes called thinking about how we as humans process information and general and typically information is processed in what cognitive psychologists would call our working memory right? Our working memory system and this is a limited capacity system, so we only have the capacity or the ability. To “work on” or to think about and manipulate in our minds, 5 to 9 pieces or chunks of information at a time.
It's really, really hard for us to consider or work on more than that. And with COVID, and with this pandemic, we're constantly bombarded with incoming information, you know, lots of factors and changes are related to the school decision as just one decision, but to any decision making, we have new info about COVID coming at us every day. And sometimes it feels like every hour we're trying to figure out what it means while we're also balancing all of our parenting and work-related responsibilities.
So there's really seemingly no reprieve from the very high mental load or cognitive load that we're experiencing right now, it's just constantly high and a related concept that I've been thinking a lot about is something sociologists call worry work. And worry work is this exhausting, draining, and often invisible labor that happens behind the scenes. It's sort of like the management of the family, and it's something that really consumes a lot of our attention and our mental resources. It can be distracting at work for us even at the best of times, but especially right now when our cognitive load is already so high.
There's a New York Times article that basically– the headline is something like Mom as the Designated Worrier, and it talks about how often, you know the research shows that often it's moms who are the, “designated worrier” of the family. They are often the person who is thinking about everything that needs to be done and holding that information in their minds and thinking about it constantly swirling in the background of their minds while they're trying to attend to and do all the other tasks that they're trying to do as a parent or, you know, as an employee.
We, you know, well who needs a permission slip and what about making this doctor appointment and oh it's going to be cold soon so we have to order snowsuits and just all of this stuff constantly swirling while we're trying to do other tasks. So we're already very cognitively overloaded. We're already worried and then you have this pressing decision about schools weighing on you and of course, not in every family, but typically the researchers show us that it's moms who are bearing more of that weight of the cognitive load.
Dr. Ruth Speidel: Yeah, so are there any kind of tangible tips or strategies that you guys might be able to offer that people could try to use to combat or kind of limit decision fatigue and cognitive load when making these big decisions and make them feel kind of less intimidating and more approachable?
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Let me just give an example 'cause I think as Lindsay was describing that I just want to maybe give an example that might help people know what we mean by that. And so there's this great article that we're going to post that's called 5 minutes in a Mom’s head by Bunmi Latin, and I remember when this article was first published. I read it and shared it with my husband, and you know, essentially she's going through and describing what it's like to be in a mom's head, right?
And so, for example, it'll just be, you know, I wonder if those clothes still fit my kid and well, if they don't, well, he'd be embarrassed and does that mean he's gonna grow up to be you know, a psychopath? And what if the kids aren't nice to him? It is like a rabbit hole we go down and I shared the article with my husband and he read it and looked at me like this is kind of a stretch, right? This is inaccurate and I said it is spot on. That is what it's like to be in my head all the time. And he’s like “oh gosh, I feel so bad for you guys.”
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: And so like, that's what we mean by this cognitive load that some of the research does suggest that it happens more for moms than it does for dads. And certainly, that was the reaction from my husband of wow if this is what it's like to be in a mom's head. I'm really sorry about that. But it's balancing, all of that that we maybe typically do. In addition to, uh, pandemic and all these other decisions, we have to make. So yeah, I just wanted to kind of give that example and see if that resonates with people around what this cognitive load might feel like.
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Yeah, there are a few things that make decisions more difficult to make and may even lead to more judgment errors. So when you're cognitively overloaded, right, there's that cognitive load concept, but again, when you're multitasking, for example, more likely to make judgment errors and decisions are harder to make. When there are conditions of uncertainty, so you're not sure what the outcome will be or there's a lot of doubt there about what the outcome could be, which is of course pretty much everything about COVID.
We're still, you know, constantly learning new information about it all the time when you're under time pressure. So when you have a deadline to make a certain decision, and when you're under a lot of stress, which is pretty much all of us during this pandemic, so these are all things that can make a decision more difficult and lead to more judgment errors.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Yeah, it was just making me think in our forensic world we have a lot of examples like this. There was a famous study done in 2011 by dancing around colleagues was called the Hungry Judge study and so in that study, they studied a group of Israeli judges and their positive versus negative decisions related to parole throughout the course of the day. So at different points in the day and in the early morning when everybody was bright and fresh, like 65% or so of the decisions were favorable to the defendant. But just before breaks for lunch, they went down to zero, and so the authors of that study argued that this has to do with our cognitive depletion, right?
That once you're refueled and rested, you're going to make better decisions, so there's been some criticisms. Certainly in our field of the methodology and interpretations in that study, but I think it's interesting that you know essentially they highlighted this notion of what you're describing, Lindsay, and what bone I circled is, you know, ego depletion like this idea that we, you know, we don't make good decisions when we're not at our best and boy did our best right now. It's hard to find what is our best, so yeah, I think that's another example of where that comes up.
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: So I think there's a couple, like very simple little things that you can do to try to limit the number of decisions you have to make in a day. Just very simple things can be taxing and lead to that decision fatigue so you know, establishing routines, meal planning so that you don't have to think about what you're going to make for dinner. Today, I've joked with my husband like I can't believe these kids have multiple times a day and you know doing some meal planning or you know, picking out what you're going to do with them the day before.
Routines for the kids, you know, you can make sure that you're taking breaks, that you're making big decisions after you know sleeping and rather than you know, late at night, after a long day? And then a really key thing that a wise person once said to me – it was Amanda – “Remember that very few decisions are permanent or unchangeable.” You know a decision works until it doesn't, and you're not making a decision you know with finality it's not set in stone, you can likely change it whatever that decision might be.
Dr. Ruth Speidel: That is so helpful.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: OK, I just add one thing to that, right? Yeah, yeah, it's related to one of the resources. So and for those of you who are in work contexts where you're also having to make decisions, whether you have staff? If you know that you're having to direct to do different things, or you're just having to make organizational decisions in your jobs, one of the videos that we're going to link to on the site, and that is in the chat now.
It was an excellent really, you know, like 20-minute webinar put out by Doctor Bruce Perry where he talked about decision fatigue, not just individually but in an organization when you're in leadership of people in your particular workplace, and so we just recommend that you check that out along with some of the other decision fatigue resources we'll post that can just help you think some of these cognitive load and decision fatigue type situations and how they might apply to you, either at home or at work, which is also at home right now, but in the kinds of things that you're having to wrestle with.
Dr. Ruth Speidel: Awesome, thanks. OK, so let's kind of shift gears and focus on the big decision that so many families are facing right now. What to do about returning to school, Amanda? What can we learn from the research about how parents should go about making these days?
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Yeah, so I am coming at this particular question or even just analysis for myself, maybe from a different lens. So I've been a risk management consultant for the last several years where I've been in that role. Helping psychologists make really complex ethical and clinical decisions, and so that's interestingly some of the lenses I've applied to these decisions. We've had to make decisions in our family because in part of that, as Lindsay and I've talked about a lot, is there's no perfect or even good choice right now, which is often the case with really complex decisions, right? Or it would be easy if there was an easy choice, we would make it.
And right now I think for many of us it just feels like there's no good choice. We're just deciding in some ways between a rock and a hard place, and there's also no risk-free decision either. No matter which way, we're sort of slicing it, there's going to be consequences of some sort, and so those are the kinds of things we're having to weigh. And then when you think about somewhat of those consequences might be or what these layers of the decision look like. We have to think about our own contexts and appreciate that we're all dealing with really different contexts, right?
So some of us have no choice, you know? Your school district has decided maybe only remote or only in person. Or you just there just really is no choice, which interestingly, I know in conversations Lindsay and I have had with friends in other parts of the country in some ways. That's a relief, right? If I don't have to make the choice, it was just made for me. Then I'm just left to deal with whatever the consequences are of that. But they don't feel that paralysis of having to make a decision that some others do so, that's one can't.
Some of you are choosing between two or more options. Do I do remote? Do I do in-person? Do I do hybrid? You know? What is it going to look like so you have a number of different options to choose from? Some of you were given a choice by the district, but maybe because you work full time, you don't feel like you have a choice, right? That is, you just don't have the option even though the option was given to you. Some of us don't have access to resources or technology that would be necessary to maybe opt for remote instruction if you wanted to.
Some you know, I saw my neighbor Angela post this, which I just thought was such a lovely perspective that she's making the choice to stay home to lighten the burden on schools and allow for more space for families who don't have the luxury to make that choice and so I just thought like what a really lovely perspective as she was thinking about kind of the village. And if I can keep my child home, I'm going to try to support a child that then has space in the classroom that can't make that choice. And on and on, right?
We have so many different contexts we're coming from and so I think Lindsay and I– it was really important to us to think about you know? This is not about judgment and telling you what is right or wrong to do. This is about giving you a way to think about it to make the right choice for your family right now, which is not going to be the same choice for another family in a different context.
So for those of you who are still having to make a choice. I think that doing a sort of risk-benefit analysis can be helpful, and so I just want to talk through a couple of basic steps of what that would look like. Be sure you're clear on the actual decision you're making, so is it whether your child should go back to school at all for the whole year? Is it just for the first quarter or for the first couple weeks? Like what is the decision you're actually having to make right now? Because it can be helpful to break the decision down into chunks that I'm not making this decision for the year, but I'm going to say OK. For the next month, here's what we're going to do. I have talked to the school and understand what my options are.
If I want to change that after a certain period of time, break it into chunks around what is necessary to decide right now, versus maybe aspects of this that can wait for things like extracurricular activities or clubs or sports. I may not need to make those decisions just yet, I just need to maybe make this one decision. Like I know Lindsay, that's what you're wrestling with, right? With a deadline next week so you know, what is the decision I have to make right now? And then maybe there are some others that I can hold off on, for now, so making sure you're clear on what the actual decision is, and then thinking about you know what are the actual risks for each option and I know. This is hard to know right now. It's really hard to find clear answers or guidance.
Some of the ways to do that are to look at rates in your area. What do the trends look like? Consult with the health department. We have some links on our website on places that you can go to for information about how to find what those trends are looking like in an area. Like I said, consult with the health department with your pediatrician. Just talk to them. Look at what experts and medical doctors around you are doing with their kids and how they're making their choices, so make sure you're looking at reputable sources. And again we'll link to some of those that we've relied on and have found helpful in our own decision making. And as you're thinking about risk, it's important to consider different domains you know for your child related to risk. This isn't just about their physical risk or medical safety or health. There's emotional risk. There's social risk. There's educational risks, right?
There's all these domains of development that we're paying attention to for our kids, so those are some of the risks we're thinking about, so then you want to think about what are the benefits of each option. In some ways, most of us now have had a sort of trial run to see how we and our kids are going to respond to these different scenarios. We got to do that between May and March and you know, say May or June depending on when your school year might have wrapped up. So I wanted to share a couple results from our study.
A few relevant things that we learned so far in the families we study. So what we found in our 450 or so families is that parents of younger children. So when I say younger from kindergarten to 5th grade reported significantly higher parenting stress. At every time point then did the parents of older children, which were 6th to 12th grade, and so our time points were right before we all went to remote learning, or in that first week, one week later, one month later, in three months. So at every one of those time points, parents who had younger children reported higher stress than did those with older children. Now for parents who have children with special needs, their stress was significantly higher than parents who did not have special needs.
And so I think you know, these things probably seem obvious, but they're important for us to take a deeper look at that and just try to understand approximately one in four children were rated by parents as having psychosocial impairments between March and June so in just those several months we saw about 25 front of the kids in our sample experiencing pretty significant psychosocial impairments.
OK, so, emotional and behavioral issues. Younger children seem to experience more behavioral problems over that three month period, whereas older children OK, so six then above seem to experience more emotional problems in both of these cases, they weren't necessarily clinically significant so severe psychological symptoms, but we're still concerned about the fact that we're seeing these changes in just a short period of time.
So the last thing here we were asking parents what they're most worried about, and so a couple of examples you know we had parents say– one parent said “I'm worried about wanting to make sure my kids feel safe and stable during all the change, but I'm finding myself exhausted and impatient due to work stress. I'm worried that people think homework and testing are more important than well-being and we also ask the kids what they're worried about, and for a kindergartener, this little one said I'm worried about my family that I love getting sick and not getting to hug anyone. I'm a hugger and I don't know how I can hug anyone anymore.” And for a third-grader who said, “I'm not worried. I know if we stay safe. We will not get it.” I love that third-grade sort of resilience like everything is fine. This is great and looking at how that might change and the 7th grader saying I'm worried that I will get the coronavirus and pass it along to you, meaning their parents, but you might get serious complications or even die and then I would blame myself for the rest of my life.
So these are some of the findings that we've seen so far. We're still diving into a lot of this, but some of these seemed pretty relevant to just thinking about, you know what we're talking about today, so again, we're looking at those risks and benefits and thinking about what's in this data are teaching us.
So are your children younger? What sort of stress are you experiencing as a parent? What kinds of worries? Does your child have and so as we think about that, then we start to look at how we make the decision? OK, so we've talked about making sure you understand what the decision is. You have to think about risks across these domains, thinking about benefits, and then making the actual decision.
So as Lindsay said, remembering that decisions are changeable, OK? Very few decisions are permanent. Tattoos aren't even permanent. Even more, you know, despite what my parents used to try to tell me, so things work until they don't. But there can also, on the flip side, of course, be relief in just making a decision as well, even if it might feel like for a limited period of time.
So I just want to give two more tips around this and then we'll talk about some other stuff. I'm sure Ruthie's got queued up for us so don't make the decision for who your kid was six months ago. OK, we have all changed in important ways that we need to factor in. What does this version of my child need right now? Now my child, six months ago? But what does this version of my child need right now? What can this version of myself as a parent provide right now. Not who I should be, not who I used to be, but who I am right now, with everything I'm carrying. What this version of myself, as a parent, provides right now. And is this version of my child’s school the right fit for this version of my child right now, right?
So the decision-making and thinking about this is more nuanced than just should I do this, or shouldn't I? And then the last, I guess, reminder, I just want to give them around decision making is that if you have more than one child, try to do this analysis that I'm kind of walking you through for each of them individually rather than as a collective unit.
So think about the strengths and needs of each child and try to make the decision that is the best fit for that child needs right now and again, I recognize that there's a lot of layers to that, and you know, we don't all have the capacity or resources to say, OK, well, I'm sending this one to school, but I'm keeping this one home, but it's important to just go through and think about each child individually and what their strengths and needs might be this version of your child.
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Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: At Pandemic Parenting, we're committed to sharing our expertise and research in ways that are immediately accessible and useful to families. As part of our efforts to sustain and expand this work, Lindsay and I are also available for virtual speaking engagements at your business organization, PTO, and more. We want to help you and those who you work with and grow with and raise your children with, have the chance to do so in an environment that fosters and supports your mental health.
Some of the topics we enjoy speaking on include parenting during the pandemic, the impact of trauma on children and families, child development, the mental health impact of COVID-19 on employees, and more. If you or your organization are interested in potentially collaborating. Please reach out to us for availability and pricing through the request to speaker form on our website at www.pandemicparent.org.
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Dr. Ruth Speidel: Lindsay, you're going through this right now and you have to make a decision soon, right? So what are some of the things you're factoring in? You're kind of weighing your options.
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Yeah, we're really in the thick of this right now our province just announced the plan for schools for next week and I just got a reminder, actually, just before our chat began, as if I could possibly forget that I have this looming decision hanging over me that I have to make. But you know, in our decision-making process, we're thinking a lot about community transmission rates and what they're like as it gets closer to school starting.
And also just knowing again that this decision isn't final and that a lot can change and that we can always go back and re-evaluate it later if we need to. I've been trying to think about both of my kids separately, as Amanda has suggested, and what might be most important for both of them, or for each of them, and also thinking about, at least for our family and the ages, that they're at, you know if I have one of the kids at home, it's in some ways easier for me to have both of them at home. So thinking about that and thinking about our family unit as a whole as well. Amanda, how did you decide?
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Yeah, so in our district, my kids are actually supposed to go back next week. We're not really sure where the summer flew by, but in our district, we were given the option. There was a whole sort of return to learn plan laid out around all the safety protocols and as well as phases of what it will look like depending 'cause the rates in our area are unfortunately going up right now, and so we've been watching that pretty closely and so now I've had lots of really difficult conversations with friends, as we're all wrestling this and coming at it from a different place, and one of the things I've really appreciated in my decision making is this notion of the village right?
And that we're all trying to be really supportive around, like making the decision that makes sense for you and your family right now. And here's what makes sense for me and you, you know? Just really trying to be supportive around each family, trying to make the best decision for themselves. And so we had various considerations. I have, you know, one child who has some significant medical issues. I have another child who you know can struggle with some anxiety at different times, and so we're thinking about different things for each of them, and what might make sense and so and also my husband and I both work and really it was a nightmare trying to juggle our both of our work schedules from home while trying to manage kids at very different developmental stages with different academic demands on their time.
And so for us, it was balancing some of the medical risks. We have to think about our home as well as our social and emotional well-being, which we also could see as different just severities of regression at different times and thinking about for each of them. What's most important and so we because I, you know, we felt comfortable with the protocol at this point, that the school is using. We've talked with some of the teachers and administrators about how they feel about going back and whether they feel safe 'cause that was important to us as well and feel okay starting them out but I am anticipating them very soon after we return, we will probably be back to remote learning so we'll see. I'm hopeful.
I really appreciate the careful thought and attention people have tried to give to making these decisions and building these safety protocols, but we'll see and I think as you've heard, Lindsay and I both say a couple times, this is the decision that makes sense for us right now and it'll work until it doesn't and two days after we go back or try to go back if we're back home, then, then we're going to have to work on making some new decisions and figuring out how to manage and just one thing I think related to that that I've watched, you know, with my kids a little bit older who understands what we're trying to decide right now, is just their need for a decision as well, right?
Like they asked us a couple weeks ago, you know, when did you get the school supply list? It's time to go school supply shopping. Why are we doing that right? This is our ritual. This is what we usually do this time of year and it's really fun and I kept being so ambivalent. Like, “oh, I don't know when we're going to get it.” Or “yeah, we got it, but I'm not sure.” And that was my own ambivalence around trying to make this decision and we're not really sure if you're going to go back and I just didn't want them to get excited.
And what I neglected to realize there was how much they needed to have a little bit of control over this and that they needed us to commit to something right and so look, mom, if we're going back to school, we need supplies, so let's do this. And so we learned a lot from them around, you know, their need for trying to control some of the little things and the things they enjoy. And the rituals we have around school and that it was our ambivalence and not answering questions that was actually making it worse for them.
Dr. Ruth Speidel: I think that's really interesting to think about what the child is bringing to the table and kind of what they're thinking about what they're worrying about when making these decisions.
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: But I just wanted to say the other, another big thing to think about maybe is age. I was listening to a webinar earlier today that was focused on adolescents. So what you're kindergarten child might need is not the same thing, obviously, as what a 15-year-old might need and so to really think about you know the social, emotional aspects, the mental health, the academic outcomes and we can post some resources and hopefully we can also eventually link to that webinar as well that talks about you, know how the academic stuff might be easier for the older kids to do right that they can do better with the distance learning, and there's some evidence of that, whereas for the younger kids, that's considerably more difficult, and they require a lot more parental instruction, so all things to think about when it comes to family functioning.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Which has been part of my I guess maybe even a little bit of frustration when I've been seeing how schools, some school districts are trying to approach this kind of similar to like I talked about siblings, right? Like making this decision about school about kids returning to school rather than breaking it down by developmental level and really looking at the research and what we know around what kids need as far as education at different developmental stages.
So making a decision for kindergarteners through third graders who make such critical developmental progress during that period of time, especially when it comes to education, is a lot different of analysis than looking at high schoolers who you know maybe can work a bit more independently or thinking about which types of high schoolers might need to go back. And so I think in the decision-making we've been seeing at all levels, it tends to just talk. We just talk about school, you know, as often this one big decision we're making as opposed to really thinking about what do kids at different stages need.
Dr. Ruth Speidel: Yeah, we have some really great questions coming in from the audience, so I'm gonna kind of pick your guys' brains on a couple of questions we have here. So Octavia and Melissa, kind of brought up some questions about how we can think about distinguishing effects of being in lockdown versus effects of not being in school? So kind of the idea is these effects we're seeing due to children being isolated from their peers, or is it due to them kind of lacking this academic instruction versus like the social behavioral piece? So any ideas about how to kind of respond to that or what the research seems to be showing about kind of what kids need at this point in time.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: I think it's hard to answer that globally, right? Because it depends so much on the child, and so, I think it's different for each child, honestly. Like, what the effects of lockdown might mean for this child with this particular temperament at this developmental stage, as opposed to this child at this other stage? And so I think some of it has to do with is it social right? We know that there are some gender differences in terms of what kids need at different developmental stages. We know that some of that has to do with just again, emotional and mental health and how they're doing, and again, what their different temperaments are like.
And so I think it just really depends when we're looking at the effects and why we're seeing different effects depends a lot on what the child is bringing to the table and then related to that, at least in our study so far, what we're seeing is it depended a lot on the parents stress too, and I think that makes perfect sense when I think about as my stress increased and I saw my kids emotional and behavioral needs increase, right like they are, you know, kind of mirroring themselves to our stress at times. And as parents, I think we often forget that we're co-regulators, so when we're, you know, working up our kids can come up to that level. But when our kids are worked up often we are using ourselves to help bring them down, right? It's why it doesn't work when your child is screaming and you scream back at them “stop yelling at me!”
Because if we're both yelling like that's not going to do it. But if you can help to kind of bring them down and use that ability to use yourself to help regulate them back down, that's incredibly helpful, and that's what this dance is that we do with our kids. So as our stress increased and we just didn't have again the cognitive capacity for the reasons Lindsay talked about to be able to to help manage our own stress, and again I was there right with you. You know? That our kids are going to come up to that level too because they're looking to their grown-ups to help regulate them. And when we're not regulated, which understandably so, it has been very hard for us to be regulated in this too. That's why we're seeing some of their emotional behavioral fluctuation.
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Yeah, I was going to add– just thinking about– there's another kind of concept that I've been thinking about a little bit with this in terms of weighing risk. We're hearing a lot about coronavirus in the news, I mean, that's all we're hearing about and deaths from it. So that's at the forefront of our thinking, but we are making this decision about– it's not like there are no risks to keeping kids home. I mean there are risks to socioemotional development to mental health to academic achievement, and you know, learning. I think that those are not as readily apparent to us because, you know, we're not seeing the news headlines about them every day. But it is important they kind of keep in mind what we are deciding between.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: That’s making me think of another example when you were just talking, Lindsay. Like when we think about the dangers of again sort of lockdown and what that means for our children regressing. I think it's also important to remember that like you are the expert in your child, nobody knows your child better than you do, and so, to not be afraid to kind of advocate for them too or make decisions that make sense for them, you know?
For one of my kids, he hated the Zoom sessions with his teacher. They caused– it's like– he's just an introverted kid and he was uncomfortable and he was so worried about like “do I know when to unmute myself at the right time?” and it caused him so much distress.
But at some point you know I reached out to his teacher and just said like, you know, “does he need to?” And she said, “Gosh, not at all. Like, they're just there to help. If they want to connect, I'm here for them. If you just want me to meet with him individually…”, but I didn't do that for several weeks 'cause here I was trying to be a good parent. You know? Checking the boxes and well my kid is supposed to log in at this time and she said, “Oh, I wish you know, I wish you would've told me, of course. He doesn't have to do that if it makes sense.”
It was a good lesson for me to advocate and recognize like this is new for all of us, and I don't know how my kids are going to respond to remote learning and how they're each going to respond differently. So to just sort of watch that and make sure there's an open dialogue with your child that they can say to you, you know, like “This is really hard for me” or “I don't understand how to do this” or “I don't like doing this” and to work together to figure out ways to make that system work for all of you and not be afraid to advocate for that. Because I think teachers really just want to be supportive as well and are trying to put lots of resources out there to be supportive, but they don't know if something is not working for your family if we don't communicate that. And that was a lesson I had to kind of learn the hard way, along with my little guy.
Dr. Ruth Speidel: So I feel like that's a very good example. We have another question from the audience from Laura, who says that there's a lot of fear and anxiety involved in either keeping children home or sending them to school. How can we manage our own fear and anxiety as parents as well as our children's fear and anxiety?
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Lindsay, would you recommend panic scrolling?
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Panic scrolling on your phone and yeah. I definitely– that's a term that might have been coined about what I was doing in the early days. Just panic scrolling on my phone, I don't recommend that. I also recommend limiting media consumption, you know? Even just kind of having news on in the background and thinking all your kids aren't really paying attention to it, you know? Even just media exposure can lead to PTSD-type symptoms, anxiety, and so it's good to kind of avoid that.
I have been thinking about ways to empower your kids and at different ages as well, you know? If masks are required, having your kids help you pick out the masks and you know what design or fabric they will have, layers of making them feel like they're part of it, and they're empowered. With teenagers, it might look different, but having allowed them to have some sort of input on if they are staying home well, what is their homeschooling routine like? And even something as simple as what order they're doing things.
Then a big one that I was thinking about was in our field being prepared for something tends to reduce stress and anxiety, so when children have to testify in court or when they have to undergo a stressful medical procedure, you know if they are prepared with knowledge and with understanding what will be expected of them and what they're going to do. Then they actually cope with it much better, so potentially doing things like a dry run of school drop off or getting them to practice doing the kinds of things that they're going to have to do in the classroom might go a long way with, you know, managing their anxiety about starting.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Yeah, and I can't underscore the idea of empowering your kids enough again, no matter what age they are and it could be as little as something like, you know– maybe now we're all sort of at home and trying to just, you know, like Lindsay talked about, reduce the number of decisions you have to make establish a routine.
It could be things, especially with younger kids like “OK, well what do we want to do?” You know most days, do you want to start out with remote learning, and then we do this, but like having them be a part of making some of those decisions, can go a long way to helping to reduce some of the stress and anxiety for all of you. So it's not a battle like there were in the mornings. I knew I'd wake up and just, oh, I can't believe I'm gonna have to fight to get us all through the data to check off all the things we have to do and when we could like let go of how we wanted to do it and involve them in the decisions it made all the difference in the world.
And so when I also think about our stress and anxiety, a big thing that helped us was again, even with the fluctuating schedules. But mostly when we were quarantined at home, which we're trying to prepare for again. Is instituting this quiet time like we were never away from each other and so in our with our different temperaments and personalities? Some more extroverted, some more introverted. We recognize that all of us are craving that even if some don't realize it, and so for us it was easy 'cause we have a four-year-old who was taking naps and so we were able to just say alright? For an hour, an hour and a half this is just quiet in our house, but it's also a long time.
It meant separating each of the kids to just have space away from each other. Even if they say they don't want to and for us to have space from them and just reset it was like a reset every day and it was amazing, and sometimes it worked better than others some days. I was, you know, fighting to get them to stay quiet and follow the guidelines, but you know it just really helped us again to have that reset period in the middle of our day and allow each of us to kind of check our stress and anxiety and then come back to the second half of the day.
Dr. Ruth Speidel: OK, well I know that we're nearing the end. Do we think we have time for one more question from the audience? OK, so this kind of came up from a couple people, Callie kind of initiated the question about like what kind of impact will kids have emotionally when school begins with all the restrictions that schools are making so kind of the idea that it's not really school as it normally is and how to kind of prepare kids for that difference? And maybe if you guys have any sense of what that impact might have on kids even I find and I will be interested to hear if Lindsay agrees with this. But I find that kids are so much more adaptable than we are, right?
Like the grown-ups have a bigger problem with this than the kids do and they again take their cues so much from us. And for many of the kids that I've talked with, including my own. But you know, kids of friends as well, they're just so excited to go back and have some semblance of school for many of them that you know? It's great whatever I have to do. And I mean, I'm even seeing the littlest ones adjusting to masks. OK, if their parents are studying a tone that hey, this is exciting, we're gonna pick this out, you know?
This is something we're all going to get used to, and it means you get to see your friends and so they really take their cue from us in a lot of ways. But they're also a lot more adaptive than we tend to be, and so I think people would be surprised at their kids adjusting often even better or faster than you anticipate them doing, depending on how we set that up for them. What do you think, Lindsay?
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Absolutely. I was gonna say the same thing, actually. That I think that they really surprise us a lot of the time with how adaptable and how resilient they are and how kind of normally it can start seeming right away. And it's not forever so you know they will get back to the old normal, but I think I think they might surprise us, and I think that it's important not to fear your own spin on it. And don't assume that you know it's going to be bad or scary or negative for them, and so it's important to think about that when doing things like drop-offs and stuff.
Dr. Ruth Speidel: So OK, well, so if there was one single takeaway message you'd like to leave parents with, what would you guys say that is from this webinar?
Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Just the, you know it works until it doesn't aspect of making the decision that you've made a lot of really critical decisions about your child's life and you will continue to do that, or you know, much of their lives. And so this is one of those decisions you've done before and you can do it this time.
Dr. Amanda Zelechoski: Yeah, and I, I think my takeaway, which, you know, maybe this will make some of you cringe. We have been watching Frozen 2 so much in my house that it has become my mantra to channel Anna, right, which is to just “do the next right thing.” Like I just keep trying to do whatever the next right thing is. What's the next decision I have to make? You know? What are we going to do about this? How are we going to tackle today, just do the next right thing? What is the next right thing and just focus on that?
And like Lindsay said, we have to make lots of really hard decisions for our kids and this is no different. But at the end of the day, it is again what we're sort of modeling, and kids just want to feel safe and secure and know that their grownups are going to, you know, be there to take care of them and be with them, and so that's what we're doing. And whatever that looks like for your family.
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Dr. Lindsay Malloy: Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Pandemic Parenting Podcast.
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