We can find comfort in DIY, but children need school to learn how to hope again BRENDA POWER
PEOPLE began queuing before seven o’clock yesterday morning at Woodies’ stores all over the country, happy to wait in the rain for two hours just to be first in the door of a hardware shop. Some of the stores chose to open their doors at 7.30am because the queues snaking back from the entrances were already stretching out of sight.
One of the truly weird features of this strange time has been the entirely random and totally unpredictable nature of the stuff we clamoured for and coveted in lockdown. Toilet paper. Flour. Baking powder. And now, to judge by the loaded trolleys being steered out by those first lucky Woodies’ customers, potting compost and white paint.
The thing they’ve all got in common, all these desperately desirable goods, is that they’re so common. They are so ordinary, the things we’re missing, they’re the household goods and products that you chuck into your basket, or stash in your garden shed without a second thought, so that they’re always just… there.
Routine
The fact that such simple things are now absent, and hard to replace, is a powerful metric of the havoc the crisis has wrought. So it’s possible that we’re not actually craving paint or flour or baking stuff or garden basics – instead, I suspect, what we’re really missing is the reassurance of normality that these humble items represent.
At least as adults we can understand why the reliable landmarks of our everyday lives have been uprooted – and even at that, it’s all driving us just a tiny bit doolally.
So if we’re missing normality to the extent of fixating on paint and flour, how is this experience impacting on children who really don’t understand why all their familiar routines suddenly disappeared?
That’s just one of the many reasons why returning children to school, for the last two weeks of June at least, is so important.
At present, it appears, the plan is to leave them at home until the new term starts in September, which will make it six months since they last sat in a schoolroom. When you’re six or seven, half a year is a huge chunk out of the life you’ve known.
And for the teachers, a twoweek ‘dry run’ for the schools’ reopening would be invaluable. We’ve seen those poignant pictures of little French children sitting in their chalked-off squares in their playgrounds – is that what’s facing Irish children when they return to classes? Or will it be possible to manage playtimes, classwork, games and activities with a minimum of disruptive restrictions: now, surely, is the time to find out, rather than waiting until September
to begin a steep learning curve then?
It would have to be voluntary, of course, and those parents still worried about sending their children to school should know that it won’t impact negatively on their attendance records. But for those who are willing to trust the science that suggests small children are at very little risk from the virus, and are perfectly safe in a well-managed school environment, then that two weeks could be their first taste of the new realities.
It would offer everyone a chance to road-test the routines that, from September, will dictate the pattern of their lives as the world gets back to normal. Given that a vaccine is still some way off and permanent lockdown is just not an option, we’ll all have to adapt to some level of risk. That will take practice, and trial and error, and some strategies will fail and others will flourish, and plans that sound flawless on paper often have a nasty way of proving unworkable in practice. Until we put them to the test, in a real-life setting like a workplace or a schoolroom, then we are simply postponing the challenges that, inevitably, lie ahead.
Clinginess
Teachers want to get back to work, most parents will be happy to relinquish their home-schooling duties to the professionals, and the children themselves are beyond bored at home. More alarming still, some parents report evidence of new anxieties in young children, a clinginess that wasn’t there before familiar things started to disappear: When your teacher and your friends are suddenly gone from your life, how do you know that your mum and dad won’t be next to vanish?
On the plus side, when you’re six or seven, even a fortnight is long enough for normality to return. A fortnight back among your classmates, a fortnight of homework, of getting up in the morning, putting on your uniform and packing your lunch – a brief glimpse of the ordinary things we’ve all missed, in our different ways, would be restorative and reassuring right now. Even if it’s just a tin of white paint.