‘A week of snow days’: Families battle cabin fever
Anita Tandon and Sujit Chakravarthy, parents of three young children, ages 3 months to 7 years old, have taken extreme measures to keep order in their home during quarantine.
“At 9 o’clock, school’s in session and I stop being ‘Mommy,’ ” said Tandon, who runs a marketing advisory firm in Burlingame, Calif. “They have to call me ‘Teacher Anita.’ They can’t just goof off like they can with Mom and Dad.”
There are worksheets, activities, Khan Academy online courses and writing games. Around 5 p.m., Teacher Anita retires to work. Chakravarthy takes over, springing out of his home office ready for PE. He goes by Coach Chakravarthy.
“It’s day three of God knows how many,” Tandon said wearily.
It has been just over a week since Americans started to be ordered to stay at home and out of the way of the coronavirus pandemic. For many people, it already feels like an eternity.
Kids are trying to escape. Careers are falling apart as parents working from home become de facto kindergarten teachers. Marriages are being strained. Couples who wanted to break up are stuck together; Craigslist roommates are suddenly family. And everyone has to stay put with others 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because there is nowhere else, really, to go.
For many people, it is hard to complain: If they can stay home as a unit and their work allows them to make a kitchen counter into an office, they are the lucky ones.
But cabin fever is setting in. Families are going slightly mad — and getting mad at one another.
On Twitter, some people cracked jokes about selling their children. Some were even tired of seeing so much of their pets. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said Sunday: “I live alone. I’m even getting annoyed with the dog, being in one place.”
The stir craziness is likely to be just beginning. By the end of last week, at least 1 in 5 Americans was under orders to shelter at home, with more states following this week. It’s unclear how long these restrictions will last. Schools might not open again until the fall.
“There’s going to be increased misbehavior, defiance, tantrums and blowing up,” said Jennifer Johnston-Jones, a child psychologist in Los Angeles. “After a natural disaster, you go back to normal. With this, there’s not going to be a back to normal.”
Sabrina Benassaya, a privacy specialist in Menlo Park, Calif., has four children between the ages of 2 and 10, whose school and day care have been canceled.
“It’s hard. I cannot lie,” she said. To survive, she had David Magidson, a clown who performs under the name Boswick, give a birthday show last week for the kids via FaceTime. The Benassayas have a house and a backyard. To quarantine in a home like that is a privilege that many American families do not have, Benassaya acknowledged.
“We are so lucky,” she said. Family coaches are offering tips to help get through this.
“One of the messages I’ve been trying to push to parents is there’s only the two of you,” said Maryellen Mullin, a family therapist in San Francisco. “Her schedule has been so full that she is starting to offer a new workshop for $20 called “My Kids Are Home, I Need Help.”
Escapism seems key. Katie Jacobs Stanton, a mother of three and the founder of Moxxie Ventures, a startup investment firm in San Francisco, dressed as if for a prom one day. Another day, the whole family wore onesies.
The burden of handling coronavirus quarantine in many homes was falling on moms, families said, with much of the new tension in couples caused by fights over what women thought were battles that had already been won. When Lea Geller, a novelist and mother of five in Riverdale, N.Y., first thought about a quarantine, it seemed it could be fun.
“I thought it would be a week of snow days,” Geller said. “But now it’s lasting forever.”