You can't helicopter school-parent in the COVID-19 storm

Depending on who you’re reading on social media (and in reader comments to The Age), either this strange pause we’re living through is a blessed gift of time to regroup, recharge and reset, or it’s the ultimate stress festival.

The always-wanted-to-be sourdough makers are baking up a storm, the crafters are creating gloriously, the neat-freaks are relishing having every cupboard tidy at once, and the lot of them are humble-bragging it like mad, bless ’em.

And then there are the parents facing down the fresh hell of open employers and closed schools.

If you’ve been online this week even for a minute, you could not have missed the huge, and justified, frustration and anxiety of many people struggling to solve the insoluble: be in two places at once and do two jobs at once – one with no training and plenty of room for family fireworks.

Common descriptions by readers of week one of the strangest school/work term of our lives included “absolute nightmare”, “dreadful”, “disaster”, “chaos”, “absolutely horrendous” and “terrible”. Some were doing fine (warm congrats from me), many were confessing they were not.

“After 30 minutes both my kids are crying and my wife is angry at me. I now have a greater respect for teachers,” wrote one.

After the first day, I'm now listening to very loud music to avoid drinking an entire bottle of wine.

The Age reader, 'Anonymous'

Another quipped: “After the first day, I’m now listening to very loud music to avoid drinking an entire bottle of wine.

“Maybe the kids (year 1 and 3) don’t need so much supervision at school, but it seems at home they need to check the answer for everything and have no capacity to think for themselves.”

That person was not even among those “trying to hold down a job”.

Others stated the obvious: trying to make your income and be educational air traffic controller for primary school-aged kids is, for many, simply overwhelming.

Parenting being the competition and perfection-fetish that it is, in the minds of people slogging through their kids’ education the stakes were already high; COVID-19 merely upped the setting from “hot coals” to “Hunger Games”.

For many, this extra layer of stress came on top of time-greedy jobs, existing financial pressure, job security worries, juggling kids’ over-crowded schedules, plus mad contemporary parenting KPIs – from pumping out five-star nutrition after work to taking notes at oboe lessons.

Not that parents are allowed to talk about the burden of any of that.

Even other parents, those blessed with super-natural organisational skills, super-efficient learners and bullet-proof nerves (and marriages), have been known to look down on their fellow competitors should they show signs of fraying. This is probably why many of the franker comments on week one were made by readers named “Anonymous”.

So with weeks of Groundhog Term ahead, what is the best plan? For a start, we must be kind – to ourselves. Though we as a cohort have been trained to be so child-centred as to put their needs first, first and first, this is no time for martyrdom.

Counter-intuitive though it seems, we must resist the impulse to helicopter school-parent in the COVID-19 storm.

Of personal comfort is the fact that six high-level education experts I interviewed for The Sunday Age last week, including several education professors, all said a few weeks or even a term of bumpy learning would not be the unmaking of kids’ education.

Each said the best we could hope to do was take an interest and engage at the edges with tasks set by schools, and the strong message was the best thing for kids is to ensure the basics are moving in the right direction (in primary school this being literacy and maths).

As a friend with 20 years’ teaching experience reminded me, if all else fails for kids in early grades in the days of school online, you can go a long way to keeping literacy up to speed simply by reading to children as often as you can and having them read to you.

All of the experts said teachers and schools were doing their absolute best, but there were bound to be hurdles, some parents and teachers would struggle, and it would not stain children’s long-term learning (though VCE kids are clearly under the pump).

Each said teachers really are adept at identifying gaps in curriculum knowledge and, having experienced the generosity and dedication of teachers as two of my kids went the K-12 marathon, and the third wades through secondary school, I believe them.

The experts each mentioned trying to be “gentle” with each other and ourselves.

It’s our own anxiety that will be the biggest bogeyman, and a great thing we can do for kids’ general wellbeing, and learning, is to get that under control. What would help is a cease-fire in the parenting wars – parenting over-achievers vs the rest of us, and everyone vs schools – and a Michael Carr-Gregg style “fit your own oxygen mask first” mentality.

And if you are one of the unicorns finding this whole school-shemozzle a lark ... maybe don’t post that on Instagram?

Wendy Tuohy is a Sunday Age senior writer