I’ve been listening to our amazing parents during the pandemic. Here are the common worries and frustrations with remote learning and some tips to help.
1. I’m worried my kids are falling behind: This is the most common and relevant. Some schools have great access to online learning while some don’t.
What can I do?
- Communicate with the school teachers to express your concerns and request extra help when they’re back to school.
- If they were taking face to face tuition, let them continue with online learning.
If parents are confident with teaching, you can find a lot of workbooks from Officeworks or online programs and set up a routine for them to do it.
2. I can’t teach and help the kids complete schoolwork: It is very hard to ask you to do this task with little preparation. It takes years for us, educators, to learn and teach every day to help your children and we’re still learning.
What can I do?
- Let go of perfection at this time. Try to help as much as you can.
- Please seek help, the first point of contact will be their school teachers.
- If they can’t do anything at this stage, you just need to surrender, let it go. They’re going to be okay, kids are very resilient, they will catch up, it’s not life-threatening. 3.Too much screen time: Because we work from home and most of the time we’re on computers, we may feel reluctant to tell them not to use iPads and computers constantly.
What can I do?
- Sit together with them and work out boundaries and reasons they can use iPads, computers.
- If they resist at first, be firm and stick to the agreement.
- They’re easily agitated from not sleeping through the night. Sometimes anger and emotional outbursts are just the surface of the feeling of loneliness and abandonment.
What can I do?
- Try to see what they are really angry about.
- Validate their feelings of loneliness.
- Share with them that you have the same feeling too.
- Make some plans of things you can do together.
- Let them FaceTime or Messenger Kids with their friends.
- I’m exhausted, so much to do: Many parents are burned out because we need to wear many hats at the same time.
What can I do?
- Delegate, delegate. We usually underestimate our kids’ ability to do different things. If they don’t spend much time and focus on study, you may as well ask them to do more chores, learn other skills that can help you.
- Do one thing you really enjoy daily: walk with friends, read a book, listen to favourite songs, exercise, play instruments, paint, talk with friends. It can be just 15 minutes but it really helps.
- Together we can get through this!
Jerry Le