Whenever I think or talk about school, I’ve been saying “we’re going to be fine.” I’m thinking, we are an upper middle class family who has everything we need–a safe place to ride out the pandemic, food on the table, a single income that supports our needs, a stay at home mom to supervise learning, devices for each kid to do their schoolwork on, and particularly in doing public school online, Poppy is bright and works hard and she doesn’t have more than the ordinary struggles with her academics. Thaddeus needs some extra assistance in some topics but again, we have the time and resources to provide that extra attention.

But you know what? As I reflect on the coming school year, it occurs to me that despite our privileges, my kids are very much not “going to be fine.”

I want to be clear that when thinking about schools, there are really no good options. There are just bad options and the bad options that makes me less likely to get sick and die. So yeah, I’m in favor of the latter. But I completely understand the initial statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics and a widespread feeling that the risk to physical health is or should be less important than the psychological impacts of staying home. That kids should be in school.

But the fact is, I really think putting kids in school is not going to alleviate those psychological impacts. I know I am constantly living in a state of constant, low-level panic. I can feel it physically, in my stomach and in fatigue. I’m basically just nervous and afraid, a bit, down inside, all day, every day. And the kids can feel it.

Oh boy, can they feel it.

Poppy has not slept a night by herself since this quarantine began. She had been having nighttime problems before but now they are completely out of control. And on a Facebook group I belong to of parents of girls right at Poppy’s age, someone posted “does anyone’s daughter have to sleep with them?” and immediately 6 responses popped up–me too, me too, me too. We’re all in bed with our kids. We’re not family sleepers so this has been rough to switch off between me and Cal as to who does Poppy duty. And we’re working on it–found a good book that seems like it will help–but I know that part of it is her own anxiety about COVID that even she can’t verbalize, and another big part is her picking up on our own anxiety.

Our bodies were not meant to take a constant level of anxiety, especially for kids. Our fight/flight/freeze instinct is perpetually activated, with the accompanying cortisol and other panic hormones flooding our systems. Every study agrees this is bad for us. And every study agrees this is particularly bad for kids. And every study agrees that this affects brain development.

Kids in less privileged situations are getting hit so much harder. We all know that. But even kids in the best of situations like ours are still getting hit. There seems to be this magical thinking that if we just send kids back to school, all of their social, emotional, and psychological challenges will disappear. But they won’t. When most of those challenges are a reaction to their parents’/caregivers’ level of constant stress–their jobs, their incomes, their exposure to COVID, their own COVID infection, and on and on–going to school and hanging out 6 feet away from your friends wearing a mask behind plexiglass shields is NOT going to solve these problems.

We need to think better. We need to be more creative. We need to do better.

Honestly I think we are the last people in the country to start school. That is, it starts next week. So. Here are my school woes.

Poppy’s school is entirely online. Yay. However, they have been very stingy with information so we don’t actually know who her teacher is or what their daily schedule will look like. Do they have to be on the screen all day? Who knows? It’s honestly really frustrating at this point. We start school in 5 days and need to know these things. There’s a parent meeting Monday night but that’s also frustrating because at some point we’re going to have to drive down (still at the mountains) to pick up her textbooks and such and it’s kind of annoying to have to just drop everything the day before school starts. Not to mention what kind of school supplies we need. Ugh.

Thaddeus, on the other hand, is doing all kinds of stuff. We started homeschooling him last December and it went poorly. However, now I feel like I have a handle on what we’re doing with him. He’s actually doing some really cool things. Monday he’s taking two online hour-long classes: Intro to Entrepreneurship and Earth Science. Tuesday he’s on 8:00-noon with an enrichment program that follows kids’ interests and works them into math, language arts, science, and social studies lessons. Wednesday he’s back to the two online hour-long classes: Adventures in Creative Writing and Greek Mythology. Thursday he’s back to the 8:00-noon program. Then Fridays he’s doing the most awesome thing ever–there’s a Makerspace near our home-home (not the mountains) and he’s going to be building with real tools starting with woodworking and moving up to things like a 3D printer. The kind of bummer about that is that we will have to drive him down the hill to go to class every Friday. That said, it puts us there for the weekend for playdates.

I’ve also been reading a lot about Gameschooling, which is pretty much like it sounds–schooling through board games. So fun with board games will be mandatory. Mandatory fun. If you do not have fun, you get an F. An F for fun. Let’s not get an F.

So we’ll see how this goes.