Our kids and their fears of COVID-19

Schools are open, but they’re different; we can see people, but not really. And as winter looms large, COVID cases continue to creep up. Schoolwide emails are appearing more frequently in my inbox, alerting us of new infections. And as I open each one, you can almost hear a collective murmur of moms saying, “just please … not our grade.”

Something pretty intense happened to my friend Lara the other night.

“It was a totally normal night, routine drill, just finished dinner and Sam just suddenly lost it,” she told me. Sam is her 7-yearold son.

It didn’t seem the right time to mention that “losing it” is an integral part of our routine these days, no matter what’s going on. Except instead of a 7-yearold, it is usually precipitated by a 49-year-old woman — me.

“At first we had no idea what was going on, he just kept yelling about how it wasn’t OK,” she continued.

Yes, exactly. It never really is OK, I agree, Sam.

“And then suddenly we realized he was talking about COVID,” Lara said. “It all came tumbling out, that he doesn’t feel safe anywhere. He kept going round and round about how is it safe to go to school if they have to wear masks? ... We shouldn’t be grocery shopping, how we could die, how OLD we were and how he’d have to live with a babysitter, how he will never see his grandparents, there are no more holidays and how nothing will ever be normal again.”

And what did Lara do? “I started to cry,” she said.

Because here’s the thing: Sam isn’t wrong.

“Quite frankly, I don’t even know how to help him ... because they’re mostly legit fears for now. I had literally just spoken to someone about how resilient kids are, and how well they adjusted. Shows how much I know,” Lara told me.

“Mom, how long did the Spanish flu last?” my 9year-old George asked me this morning out of nowhere, on our way to school.

“Well, the thing that’s weird about the Spanish flu is that it first showed up in the spring, just like COVID, and then slowed down in the summer, but then in the fall …,” I suddenly realized this was not going in a good direction.

“Great,” George said, looking out of the window. He didn’t need me to finish the sentence.

I’ve heard this from a lot of parents. Their children seem fine with COVID, but then they notice weird stuff. My husband and I were confident our kids were handling the pandemic well, but when Lara told us about Sam, things started to click.

“Sam hasn’t slept in his room in months,” she told us.

Neither have Selma and George; they have been sleeping in our room since March. We had not made the connection, somehow.

“I’m not scared of CO

VID,” my 12-year-old son Louie told me. “Old people need to be careful, but it’s not as bad as people think it is.”

“Um … it’s pretty bad,” I found myself saying. “The current death toll is higher than the Vietnam War, September 11th and the Revolutionary War combined.”

And suddenly, I’m the mom in the minivan freaking out her kid about a global pandemic.

“Those are lies,” Louie told me.

“How do you know?” I asked him, getting mad.

“True Facts on TikTok,” he responded.

You have got to be kidding me.

“Denials, distractions, distortions, disappearing into video games,” a child psychologist told me. “All the D’s … they’re all fair game right now. Remember, screens are a way to go down rabbit holes, to get lost from the here and now.”

Yeah, but most kids loved screens before the pandemic, so how do we know this is different?

“Everything is just MORE,” he said. “If your kid is competitive, he becomes hyper-competitive … shy, the same. It’s like everything has become a more exaggerated form of what it was before.”

We know an 8-year-old who lost her father two years ago, “and all the trauma came right back,” her mom said. “It was like we were at square one again.”

“I definitely don’t have my pre-COVID child back,” one mom said.

“What were ‘ body breaks’ in school are now ‘crying breaks’,” a teacher told me.

“Mom, no one can do play dates, no one can do anything and now you don’t want me to play Roblox?!” George hollered tearfully at the dining room table.

We never used to allow video games during the week, but they’re sneaking back into the midweek mix.

Adopt Me and Bloxburg are two of the biggest multiplayer online role-playing games on the Roblox platform, and both have seen their numbers soar since March. These games allow kids to have virtual playdates while constructing an entirely different world. It’s a way to rewrite and cope with the world; kids just create another one, a better one with pet unicorns and rainbow houses. Better still, kids can do all of this with their friends, you know: the ones they can’t see any more in that other world … the real one, the one that’s just not as much fun.

We’re in an odd place now. Like the Spanish flu, it looks like we are stepping into what could be another surge — yet we’re coming from a better place than in the spring. There are fewer deaths, more knowledge, better tests, more progress toward treatment and vaccines. We seem to be over the initial shock and settled into our new (yet hopefully temporary) normal.

Schools are open, but they’re different; we can see people, but not really. And as winter looms large, COVID cases continue to creep up. Schoolwide emails are appearing more frequently in my inbox, alerting us of new infections. And as I open each one, you can almost hear a collective murmur of moms saying, “just please … not our grade.”

My husband and I had a frank discussion about our will last night, something we do every few years when it suddenly occurs to us that we are not immortal. In the middle of all this, I was listening to a podcast on setbacks in vaccine development, and the host kept stressing that “ultimate protection” was still a ways off. I’ll admit, estate planning and a global pandemic do not make for a cheerful conversation pairing, but there was something about how the podcast host kept repeating “ultimate protection” that really got to me. Ultimate protection?

As I headed up to get everyone in bed, I noticed George sitting on the stairs in his Flash superhero costume, waiting for me. This Velcro outfit, from two Halloweens ago, features foam muscles with lightning bolts across them and six-pack abs. We hadn’t seen it in ages.

George informed me he would be sleeping in his costume, that it was important, and yes, he had brushed his teeth.

But it wasn’t until tucking him into bed, after a lengthy debate on whether or not it was safe to sleep with a large lightning bolt across his face, that it clicked.

“Don’t worry,” George told me. “I’ll be your ‘Ultimate Protection,’ Mom.”