How can parents navigate other parents — and their kids — around physical distancing rules? — via healthing_ca
In a monthly advice column for Healthing.ca, Toronto-based parenting expert Alyson Schafer answers your most pressing questions.I am wondering if you can comment on what parents should be doing about kids and reopening. It’s hard to “bubble” when you have three kids who have different friends, whose parents you may not socialize with, for example.
People are trying to figure out how come you can go to a day camp, but not to overnight camp? Why are schools open in rural Quebec, but not Montreal? If you can go to a golf course, why can’t you go to a swimming pool? It’s okay to get the dog groomed, but you can’t get your own hair cut? The first issue is between parents themselves. Tensions are growing in neighbourhoods as various households enforce or relax the rules at different rates. Some parents are merging bubbles with friends and neighbours beyond the current recommendations of the health authorities. That puts the more compliant families in a tough position. While they are being judged as being uptight or paranoid, relaxed families feel they are being demonized.
Each family needs to discuss with their children what is, and isn’t, allowed in their own family regarding social distancing and social contact. Explain that others are making different decisions and interpreting risk differently than you, but as a parent it is your job to keep the family safe the best way you know how.
Many parents, faced with their own fear of losing control of their children’s behaviour, turn to more punitive discipline tactics, but punishments are more likely to lead children to either rebel, or if they are more the devious type, sneak around your control. As parents, our best course of action is not punishment, but rather to appeal to them through compassion for their loneliness, and then share our reasoning and sensibilities for why the rules are important. It’s is more effective to sway their attitudes and opinions about the risk factors of spreading the virus by leveraging the strength of your good relationship with them. When the relationship is healthy, teens don’t want to let their parents down.
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