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Not that long ago, days for Kate Lee-Leidy and her two kids rushed by in a flurry of routine tasks and general “busyness.”
Lee-Leidy needed to get Jackie, 9, and Babe, 8, to school by 8:15 a.m., then catch BART for her tech job in Oakland. After school, there was baseball practice, tennis lessons and homework. On some nights, Lee-Leidy, Jackie and Babe wouldn’t get home until after dinner, with homework still ahead, plus lunches to pack and work to prep for.
That busyness came to a halt Monday, with schools closing for the foreseeable future and a stay-at-home order to halt the spread of coronavirus in the Bay Area.
The world for Lee-Leidy and her children suddenly shrank to their two-bedroom Lafayette apartment with no patio. Lee-Leidy, who shares custody of her children with her ex-husband, certainly worries about work, keeping the kids from getting sad or bored and overseeing their remote classwork. If schools remain closed for the rest of the year, she worries about cabin fever and an uncertain future.
But Lee-Leidy said they now have hours that aren’t booked with things to do and places to go. There’s a lot of togetherness, which is actually nice.
“It’s not often that after dinner, we’d do a slow walk around the neighborhood,” Lee-Leidy said on Tuesday. “We did that last night. We’re also having conversations we might not have had time for before. My daughter and I stayed up for 30 minutes last night, lying in bed, talking about the galaxies and the universe.”
In the first week of lockdowns for a historic global pandemic, families are struggling to adjust to a new reality. Parents have to play the role of teacher, a job for which they have no training. They’re also trying to manage their own anxiety, while their kids, generally pretty social creatures, are cut off from friends.
But like Lee-Leidy, many families are trying to find the proverbial silver lining in this national crisis. Parents interviewed said their families are enjoying time together in ways that are often elusive in the Bay Area, a region known for residents with over-scheduled lives.
“This whole thing is terrible,” said Rachel Estrella, of Oakland, about the pandemic that’s sent her 15-year-old son, Kai, and 10-year-old daughter, Bailey, home from school and ended their beloved but demanding schedule of choir and violin practices.
“At the same time, the pace of our lives had become overly frenetic,” said Estrella, who is working from home for a research and evaluation firm. “The kids were feeling overwhelmed by the pace, their parents’ work lives, the requirements of school. We have all felt like we did not have enough time to, as my son would put it, ‘just chill together as a family.’ While (this is) having so many negative impacts, it’s also forcing everyone to slow down.”
Heidi Warren, a call center employee, mostly stays confined to the two-bedroom San Jose apartment she shares with her husband, a grocery store worker, and their two children, 4-year-old Jeffrey and 7-year-old Jade. Up until a week ago, family time was limited to two hours in the evening because of her long commute — but those hours usually were taken up by dinner, homework and cleanup.
“The silver lining is definitely being with my children and spending time that our normal schedules would never allow for,” Warren said.
Dione Travis, of Dublin, is definitely trying to look for “the positives” right now, she says, which include “quality time” with her daughters, 14 and 17, while she and her husband, a Workday employee, are at home.
“My best friend always says, ‘Find your rainbow.’ Maybe it’s a little sugary sweet, but I also think sometimes it’s truly the only way I’m able to get through times like this,” Travis wrote in a Facebook post.
To that end, Travis is helping her daughters appreciate all the “random acts of kindness” they have witnessed in the past week: “Like my amazing neighbors who brought us a platter of spaghetti and garlic bread last night that just felt like pure love in food form.”
Mark Reinecke, a psychologist and clinical director at the Child Mind Institute in San Mateo, agrees that “optimism, hope and tenacity” are necessary for getting through any challenge, however dire. Certainly, families miss all the things they can’t do right now — socializing at school pickup, weekend soccer games, dinners with friends. But they also need to focus on what’s in front of them.
“It is possible to find happiness, hope, connection, meaning and value during challenging, uncertain times,” he said in an email. “By forcing us into our homes, this pandemic has made our worlds small. We’re pressed into reconnecting in a more intimate, thoughtful manner. We’re pressed to enjoy simple experiences and activities.”
Above all, he said, this experience can teach children a valuable life skill: resilience.
Children and teens become resilient by learning to solve problems, regulate their emotions and build social support, Reinecke said. “Resilience is earned through adversity,” building confidence that a person can overcome any challenge, he said.
Carolina Katz, of Walnut Creek, believes that today’s youth, including her 18-year-old son, Cameron, are more resilient than parents think. “I do feel that as babies of the post-9/11 world, they have resilience in their DNA. Whether they know it or not, they will get through this.”
A graduating senior from De La Salle High School in Concord, Cameron is disappointed that he probably won’t have his senior ball and graduation ceremony — things he’s been looking forward to since freshman year. He’s also stressed about which colleges he’ll get into while preparing for still-scheduled Advanced Placement tests without in-person help from his teachers. Still, he emphasized his own silver lining: his gratitude to his teachers.
“They’ve been awesome,” Cameron said Wednesday. “I’m grateful by how dedicated they are, how willing they are to help us adjust to this change. They’ve done the best they can to make it as good an experience as possible.”
Milpitas Unified second-grade teacher Adrienne Barber hopes the parents of her students can be kind to themselves and “take a pause” from the common Bay Area worry that these changes in their children’s education mean “they won’t get into Stanford.” Barber, who lives in San Jose, urges parents to enjoy the time with their kids.
Her 11-year-old daughter says that being home may not be normal, but it’s still fun — she actually has more time to talk to friends and do “fun things” like gardening and drawing.
As the week dwindled down, Lee-Leidy’s ex-husband took the kids for a couple days. “I’m fortunate we have two households,” she said. “It gives them a change of scene.” And she’s trying not to focus too much on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement that schools were “likely” to remain closed the rest of the year.
“I’m focused on one day at a time and on what I can control and what I can’t,” she said. “We will get through it, of course, no matter what.”
