CALL HER JO COOL
‘Supernanny’ helping parents on social media during crisis
THE pandemic shutdown has enabled
“Supernanny” star Jo Frost to shift into high gear — off-camera — to help parents cope with the virus and its impact on their family dynamics.
Frost, 49, was in the midst of shooting her series, which moved to Lifetime in January after a six-year run on ABC (20052011), when production stopped in midMarch.
That’s when her popular social media accounts “went off the charts” with parents seeking parenting advice, she says.
“That first stage was pandemonium and everybody panicked, which is typical for all of us,” Frost tells The Post. “Parents were having what I’d call ‘pandemic challenges’ along the lines of home-schooling and creating healthy boundaries for [their families] and not being on top of each other and getting irritable.
“By Day 3 of the [shutdown] [the tweets and e-mails to her] increased by the thousands and I was like, ‘Whoof!’ I can’t find any other word to explain it,” she says. “I could feel the energy of those e-mails and tweets and could read between the lines. It was all there in black-and-white.
“I felt like, ‘OK, what can I do?’ I can help one family at a time,” she says. “If someone reached out to me on Twitter or DM’ed me, I would set aside time for them. Even my day with [husband] Darrin [Jackson] and our grandson, Eli, had to be structured so that we had time as a family. I set aside a block of time when I could reach out to people in countries all around the world.”
Frost says the pandemic served to “heighten” parental challenges that were always there, and not just for the families seen on “Supernanny,” expected to return for the second half of its season later this summer.
“Parents are now basically doing what I require of them to do to receive my help, which is to be at home more,” she says. “There’s no excuse that, ‘I don’t have the time’ or ‘I don’t handle the parenting as much because I’m at work or ‘His or Her job starts at whatever time so it’s difficult.’
“Every parent has to accept that this [pandemic] has an ebb and a flow; there’s no definitive date for when it will be finished and the psychological reality is that nobody knows,” she says. “I’m saying, ‘Right, you’ve got to knuckle down; you’ve gotten through three months of this and, on a spiritual level — and I really do feel strongly about this — this year has made us concentrate and look inward and recognize what’s of value to us, and not monetarily.”
If anything, Frost says, the pandemic has allowed families to go back to basics and hit the reset button.
“No one should feel like 2020 is cancelled and should be whitewashed,” she says. “First and foremost is for families to stay focused in a distracted world where many of those distractions are now gone. One of my ongoing messages is the importance of families not being polarized. It’s important to talk about routines and bring everything into the middle and not to one extreme or another.
It’s important for families to have a sense of purpose. The past few months has brought back the art of eating around the dinner table, for families to sit down and have conversations.
“It’s an opportunity for moms and dads to connect with their teens and for teens and younger siblings to feel validated … to talk about gratitude and keep focusing on the blessings of right now and being present in the moment because they’re so much we can’t control,” she says.
“The importance of being present is the biggest gift we can give our children.”