This past year has been a crazy one. COVID-19 hit the scene in March and it seems like every month after has been one new roller coaster after another. Every year has its share of ups and downs, but this year has been the biggest highs and the lowest of lows. From widespread pandemic to protests for civil rights, an impeachment hearing, fires across the western half of the United States, it seems like each month that passes is trying to one up the last.
We’ve spent a lot of the year in isolation. So much of the year, in fact, that my nearly fourteen month old daughter has officially spent more of her life in lockdown than she has outside of it, and I sometimes wonder what this means for her future. Thankfully, her two older siblings have stepped in and given her lots of social interaction, and her doctor says she is doing just fine, but mothers worry, (as my mom would say, “it’s a mother’s prerogative.”) and who knows what implication this isolation and remote education could have on the future of all our children?
The one thing that gives me solice is the knowledge that, more than time spent with peers their own age, what children need is time spent with their own families. Research on the different levels of communication between children who have been homeschooled and children who have been educated in public school and/ or put into daycares has shown that those that have an education from home have a more adult like set of social skills than their publicly educated peers. When you really look at it, it kind of makes sense. Children who are taught social skills primarily from adults are learning from someone who has already had a lot of experience fine-tuning their communication skills, whereas children who learn from other children will be all learning together. Of course, this assumes that the parents are not teaching the children dysfunctional forms of communication, but all else being equal, children may learn more effective communication skills from those who have already refined them rather than from those who are still learning, themselves.
That being said, children do tend to learn more quickly from peers close to their own age, so in the end, everything will probably balance out, but hopefully, the knowledge that kids still turn out well even when their access to members of their own age group is limited will alleviate any anxieties you feel during this time about how the isolation we currently find ourselves in will affect the younger members of your family.
