With schoolchildren across the country being compelled to stay at home in order to stop the spread of COVID-19 parents have been forced to do that which so many do not attempt any efforts in, and that is raising their own children and homeschooling them. As it is reported by Fox5NY, a lot of parents are giving up and saying they cannot handle the work.
Frustration is mounting as more families across the U.S. enter their second or even third week of distance learning — and some overwhelmed parents say it will be their last.
Amid the barrage of learning apps, video meet-ups and e-mailed assignments that pass as pandemic home school, some frustrated and exhausted parents are choosing to disconnect entirely for the rest of the academic year. Others are cramming all their children’s school work into the weekend or taking days off work to help their kids with a week’s worth of assignments in one day.
“We tried to make it work the first week. We put together a schedule, and what we found is that forcing a child who is that young into a fake teaching situation is really, really hard,” said Alexandra Nicholson, whose son is in kindergarten in a town outside Boston.
“I’d rather have him watch classic Godzilla movies and play in the yard and pretend to be a Jedi rather than figure out basic math.”
That stress is only compounded for families with multiple children in different grades, or when parents work long hours outside the home. In some cases, older siblings must watch younger ones during the day, leaving no time for school work.
“I think the pressure is on and I think it’s on even more for some of our low-income families. It’s totally overwhelming,” said Rachel Pearl, chief program officer for Friends of the Children-Portland. The Portland, Oregon-based national nonprofit pairs paid mentors with at-risk children.
“A lot of our families already feel they’re not doing enough when they are working so hard and I fear they will fear they are failing at it.” (source)
Homeschooling is very hard, but so is raising children.
Unfortunately, the American school system acts as a surrogate babysitter. For some people this is important because parents today have been forced due to socially engineered changes to have two parents working, but as many cannot work because of the virus situation, parents and children are forced to live with each other and work together.
As I have noted before in previous stories, the COVID-19 crisis has not caused problems so much as exposed serious system flaws that were existing for many years, and the exposure of problems is never fun but is good in so far that it presents the opportunity to correct the problems. A lot of these problems were created out of greed by “business leaders” who aggressively pursued short-term profit at the long-term expense of the common man. These people are not “leaders”, but narcissistic psychopaths who at the absolute least need to be put into prison cells and never released from them.
The American family has been broken for a very long time. Part of the reason it broke was because of the government pursuing policies encouraged by individuals, families, and lobbyists in finance, industry, and business, but it was also because people accepted the changes for selfish reasons and refused to fight against them. A lot of Americans for the last century would rather enjoy an ‘easy life’ of a false luxury and apathy rather than plan for the future, and this was drilled into the culture as a type of value to pursue.
The virus did not create this. But by forcing parents and children to work together, and realizing they cannot work together well and there are a lot of problems, is not causing dysfunction, but showing that the family unit is mostly broken and does not work well together in modern times.
In order to fix society, one must repair the broken family situation, because the society is a reflection many times throughout history of the state of the family.
Parents get frustrated because children act up. This is not a new problem. Rather, it is for parents to work through them, even if it is slow, and get them resolved, not to just give up and run away. However, this is what many people want to do, and while I cannot see direct proof of additional data, it would seem to be likely it is more the “strong women” who are giving up because a lot of the apathy and laziness in society was lobbied for and driven by them by exploiting the sense that many have for power and money and social status versus other women.
Consider this virus as a blessing- it is a great time not to complain or run away, but to get work done and to prepare for a future that is uncertain, for there is no time like the present to get oneself into a situation that will enable him to weather whatever tomorrow will bring.