4/8/2020 Parenting through the coronavirus lockdown, especially for moms who carry the burden - CNN

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Parenting through the coronavirus lockdown

By Elissa Strauss, CNN
 Updated 10:07 PM ET, Tue March 17, 2020

Portrait of cute little boy painting picture with mom helping him, copy space

(CNN) — Writing this was hard.

Practically speaking, I'm feeling overwhelmed. I am behind on work because we kept my runny-nosed but
otherwise seemingly fine, toddler home from school for a few days to not worry his teachers.

My online shopping cart has been subject to a large number of orders and revisions. Do we need more toilet
paper? Canned tuna? How much is prudent? How much is hoarding or even ethical?

I, too, have taken a deep dive into the world of hand sanitizer on the internet. I still remain empty-handed. Then
there's the extra laundry, the extra food prep and the firm commitment to making sure everyone gets to sleep on
time to keep their immune systems in high gear.

All this, and the question we've all asked so many times that
we can barely recognize the words anymore: Did you wash
your hands? Did you wash your hands? Did you wash your
hands?

Emotionally, I'm unmoored. I worry about my friends and

family getting Covid-19. I worry about schools shutting down. I
worry about schools not shutting down.

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4/8/2020 Parenting through the coronavirus lockdown, especially for moms who carry the burden - CNN

Like many moms, I am the one in my marriage with a flexible

job, which means that all scheduling upheavals Lare
I V Emine
T V to
manage and that I don't get paid sick days.

On top of this, I spent two full work days reading everything I

could find about the virus —research for this article. Like
many, I went from cautious to nervous to panicked at a
breakneck speed. The more you know. I saw harrowing
photos of Italian hospitals. I read charts illustrating America's
unpreparedness. Tom Hanks. The NBA.

This is parenthood in the time of the coronavirus.

Related Article: Getting dads to do more
around the house, starting with a history
lesson
It's demanding, emotional -- and to think I felt overwhelmed
last month. For me and many others, managing the threat of
the virus is adding a new and significant dose of domestic
and emotional labor to our lives. If you are the mom in the
family, odds are that most of this labor is falling in your lap.

Managing the feelings and anxiety

The act of parenting, or parenting well at least, requires some baseline anxiety.

"Part of becoming a parent is about becoming hypervigilant to potential threats. You become a threat detection
machine," said Darby Saxbe, associate professor of psychology and director of the Center for the Changing Family
at the University of Southern California.

What makes coronavirus anxiety so much worse than will-my-toddler-run-into-tra c anxiety is its potential for
disruption of our daily routines combined with a deeper uncertainty about how it will play out.

How long will our kids be out of school? How will we get our work done? And this goes for parents with paid
employment, as well as those who stay home. Managing kids and a house is work.

The logistical anxieties are far more severe for the millions of
parents who are also caring for an elderly parent, or don't
have access to paid sick leave. In normal times, this includes a
quarter of private sector workers and 70% of low-wage
workers, according to the National Partnership for Women &
Families (PDF).

From there, it's easy to drift to bigger, more existential

questions. How many people will die? Also, pandemics are
stress tests for societies. Will ours pass?

Related Article: Parents: Take social

distancing seriously and limit playdates,
other activities, experts say
Hijacking our parenting instincts
"We wouldn't have a species if we didn't have these
mechanisms for responding to our kids," Saxbe said. "But
these global issues can hijack these systems for being a
protective parent."

Yael Krieger is a mother of three young children in Berkeley, California. Anxiety prone to begin with, she now finds
herself in a constant battle with worst-case scenarios that keep bubbling up in her head.

At the center of her anxiety sits all the unknowns, which are di cult to reason through. For one, our understanding
of the disease and how it functions is extremely limited, and there are new findings every day. Also, she feels that
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4/8/2020 Parenting through the coronavirus lockdown, especially for moms who carry the burden - CNN

the US government has given her very little reason to have faith in its ability to manage the outbreak.
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"There is a lot of cognitive frustration. Why isn't our
government doing more? Why haven't they been testing? And
how am I supposed to take care of my children properly,
knowing that the people who are supposed to be taking care
of the country properly aren't doing their job?" Krieger said.

Saxbe suggests that parents try to take breaks from the news,
and put their family's risk in perspective. She knows it will be
hard. (It is.) We need to try anyway.

"In a scary world, it is important for parents to protect their

mental health, because kids can be traumatized by a parent's
anxiety," she said.
Related Article: Worried about
coronavirus? If your loved one is over 60,
read this A sense of order amid the chaos
While all kids are feeling nervous to some degree, those
whose schools are canceled are likely to be extra unsettled. Kids thrive on stability and routine. When it goes away,
it is up to parents to model how to cope, Saxbe said.

To survive, we all need to both commit ourselves to some sense of order, and at the same time, yield to the chaos.

Parents, do what you need to lower your stress levels, whether it is carving out alone time or exercise time. Maybe
you ease up on your television and video game policy or accept the power of candy as a bribe to help you kids
comply. Create some structure that you can realistically commit to and on most days, achieve, and importantly,
make sure you are enjoying some parts of it.

Yehuda Kurtzer has three children, two of whom have missed

some school because of the coronavirus, and one of whom is
quarantined for potential exposure. He's part of a dual-
working couple based in Riverdale, New York, and tends to
travel a lot for work.

Working from home with his kids around has been a bit crazy-
making, as can be expected. But he's managing to mitigate
some of the attendant anxiety by finding ways to live that
"1950s" life that is, in normal times, impossible for his family to
achieve.

"We've been doing a lot of laundry, and have made a big

Related Article: Parents, stop feeling so priority of sitting down and eating normal meals together,"
guilty about TV time Kurtzer said. "We want to instill a sense of hygiene in our
house, and a sense of community. Both of those things feel
important."

Women take on more of the 'emotional labor'

Whether children are in or out of school, the threat of the coronavirus has made managing family life a much
bigger job. Odd are, moms are taking on more of this emotional and domestic labor.

Eve Rodsky, author of "Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to
Live)," said research shows that the majority of daily life disruptions are handled by moms, including when both
parents work.

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4/8/2020 Parenting through the coronavirus lockdown, especially for moms who carry the burden - CNN

"We treat women's time as infinite, like sand. And we treat men's time as finite, like a diamond," Rodsky said. As a
result, women do caregiving when they have to, and men do caregiving when they can. LIVE TV

On top of this, women are more likely to do what experts call "worry work," Rodsky explained. Moms are more
likely than dads to anticipate the needs of the family and plan ahead for worst case scenarios. (Listen closely, and
you can hear the hum of "what's next?" on a constant loop in most moms' heads.)

Case in point, my deep familiarity with the Target.com shopping cart and hand sanitizer Reddit threads over the
past week.

Erin Vey, a full-time working mother of two in the suburbs outside Seattle, said that local school closures have
served as a wake-up call for many families about just how much more childcare and domestic management
moms do than dads -- even when they both have full-time paid jobs.

"A lot of moms are bearing the brunt of working and managing all the communications from the school [which has
set-up remote learning]. There are maybe five an hour." Vey said.

"There are also lots of logistics in terms of shopping," she said, as a lot of essentials, including toilet paper, are sold
out in local stores. "All this ends up in women's laps."

We're in this together

Some men Vey knows have responded to the everybody's home situation by demanding their personal space and
time, with one going as far as setting up an o ce in the master bathroom with the door closed while his employed
wife and the kids stayed away.

"If that doesn't say 'the mom is doing everything,' I don't know what does," Vey said.

But many others, like her husband, are reckoning with the imbalance in their homes, and are trying to change it.
Before the coronavirus, Vey's husband hadn't paid much attention to emails from their daughter's schools. Why
bother? His wife would take care of it.

Now, they are tag teaming -- splitting work days and house management as much as possible, and it is making life
much better.

If there is a silver lining in all this, or at least a lesson that we

might want to impart to our kids, it's this. In our cities, our
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workplaces, our classrooms, and our homes, we are being
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Parents: When you tell your children to wash their hands,
Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the
don't just say they need to do it in order keep themselves or
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the family healthy.

Tell them they need to wash their hands in order to keep

everyone healthy, and explain why. Then maybe leave a note
for an elderly neighbor asking if they could use any help.

Germs, like love and care, move between us. Being aware of the former is a way to share the latter.

Elissa Strauss writes about the politics and culture of parenthood.

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