Families matter again
WHEN Ramona and Mario Singer (pictured) had a nasty divorce four years ago, no one thought they would even speak again. Yet now they are sheltering in place at his Florida home with their daughter, looking for all the world like a cozy couple.
Friends whisper that, after two months of quarantine, the “Real Housewives of New York” star might be in love again.
“It’s going pretty well,” she told a reporter last month. “Much better than I anticipated. We’re really bonding.”
Jimmy Fallon also has declared that isolating at home has brought him closer to his wife of 12 years, Nancy Juvonen.
“It’s been very bonding . . . We were like: ‘We actually like each other! We chose well!’ ”
Such is family life in a global pandemic. The reality is a remarkable repudiation of the gloom and doom pumped out by relationship experts, child shrinks and divorce lawyers.
As if the nuclear family were a malignant threat to health and sanity, they predicted the worst from close confinement: domestic violence, child abuse, “irreversible” damage to intimate relationships, and a divorce epidemic.
But anecdotal evidence is that children are happier, and a lot of families are getting along better than ever. Enforced isolation has brought a newfound appreciation for family life that is the silver lining to this wretched pandemic.
You can see clues in the sales figures; board games like Monopoly selling like hotcakes and a surge in communal sports equipment such as basketball hoops and footballs.
The craze for home baking has sparked a flour shortage. Without easy access to fast food, families are making their own bread and eating meals together, as fresh produce flies off the grocery shelves.
At a time of national crisis, Americans have had to slow down and turn inward, and those lucky enough to live with family are counting their blessings.
There is even a Facebook group, “Unintended Positives from Shelter-in-Place 2020,” with almost 7,000 members sharing silver linings, such as “I’ve connected with family more.”
On social media, discussion boards and letters pages, people are expressing gratitude for the unexpected richness of relationships they once took for granted.
A mother in Texas whose daughter had come home to stay wrote to a newspaper: “We make bread, dinner and desserts together, and all three of us laugh like little kids. I almost never want it to end.”
Another wrote of the new camaraderie between her sons: “I have caught my oldest son helping his little brother with his online Spanish class and have heard conversations filled with advice . . . and it just melts my heart.”
A woman wrote that she and her husband were practicing the foxtrot: “We love our daily dancing date, we’re getting good at it, and it’s bringing us closer together.”
Students sharing COVID experiences for their high-school paper, the California Granite Bay Gazette, wrote of missing friends but also valuing families.
“I finished the day by watching ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ on Hulu with my family, which was a lot of fun since we don’t always get time to hang out as a family when things are normal,” wrote senior Brent Evans.
Under the headline “Why some kids are happier right now, and other unexpected effects of quarantine,” CNN found “hundreds of parents from around the United States [feel] a sense of relief and joy [that] their children seem happier.”
One mother said her kids, ages 8, 7 and 4, have become “better behaved, kinder to one another and more independent . . . It’s been really eye-opening. I don’t want it to go back to the way things were.”
And while education academics warned that home schooling would set back the COVID generation, in practice, a lot of children have thrived, so much so that teachers now want to learn from the experience.
Parental attention, a more relaxed schedule and sleeping in helped, according to Edutopia, the online education hub of the George Lucas Foundation.
In an article titled: “Why Are Some Kids Thriving During Remote Learning?” it found the benefits evident especially in “shy kids, hyperactive kids, highly creative kids.”
Such positive news flies in the face of this month’s Harvard Magazine cover story, which claims home schooling “violates children’s right to a meaningful education and their right to be protected from potential child abuse.”
It is rife with “racial segregation,” “female subservience” and, horror of horrors, “conservative Christian beliefs,” wrote Professor Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard Law School.
Her timing couldn’t have been worse.
Families can see that the real agenda of left-wing educators is to push parents aside and impose their own values on our children.
But it turns out the obituaries for the nuclear family were premature, judging by these tales from the lockdown.
All the hard work of leftists to destroy the family unit has come to naught.
In fact, W. Bradford Wilcox, senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, predicts: “In facing new trials and tribulations, married men and women will be less focused on their own emotional fulfillment and more focused on meeting the basic financial, social and educational needs of their [families]. Divorce rates will fall, and marital commitment will rise, as a family-first model of marriage comes to the fore.”
Let’s hope he’s right because we will need strong families to see us through tough times ahead.