Twenty or so years from now, a whoooooole lot of today's kids are going to be PISSED and rightfully so. Once they are parents themselves, they're going to look back at this whole thing and wonder WHY THE HELL ARE SO MANY OF Y'ALL PUTTING RESPONSIBILITY FOR MAKING HEALTH AND SAFETY ISSUES ON YOUR KIDS?
I'm serious, y'all.
Let me give you an example. There are several running threads of people asking questions about what we're going to do with school cheer this year. For the high schoolers, it's already a done deal. We've already been required to pay a hell of a lot of money for a season that isn't going to happen because heaven forbid the kids stand on the sidelines at a football game in anything other than matching ($$$) track suits. I threw $500 to the wind a month ago and with every passing day, it becomes closer to certainty that it was money wasted.
Little kid cheer, though. That's a whole other drama. For the record, Mila will not be participating this year. She wants to, I said no, she's cool with my decision. It was actually a very easy conversation, but then again I routinely dose my kids with, "That's my decision and you're going to have to be okay with it." Am I in the minority? Because I'm seeing a heeeelllll of a lot of parents who are posting, "So ... what are we doing with cheer this year?" on social media and most of the responses are something like, "Clara really wants to do it so I signed her up."
WTAF IS THAT NONSENSE? Why are you delegating YOUR job as a parent to an 8-year old? Clara probably wants to glue wings to a llama and fly it to Glitterland as well, but are we giving her that choice?
Now is exactly the time when you have to be willing to tell your kids they can't always get what they want.
I get it, of course. It sucks to be a parent right now. Not a single one of us signed up for this whole thing and we absolutely get to spend the rest of our lives knowing we parented at the hardest time to parent in generations. Our parents may have walked uphill both ways in the snow as kids, but we had to make decisions in the time of COVID-19. THIS CRAP IS HARD, Y'ALL. I say that as someone who spends a lot of her professional life mitigating risk and shooting through narrow doorways of opportunity. I can read scientific documents better than average and have access to crazy amounts of COVID-19 data because of what I do for a living. Still, I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO. Every decision feels like the weight of 80900 elephants and I can only imagine how much harder that has to be for people who don't make big decisions every day. It's confusing and it's hard and it's not going to get better anytime soon.
That doesn't mean you get to turn to your kid and say, "Well, what do you want to do?" What do you think is going to happen when it all goes bad? Are you going to mourn the loved one who died while looking at Clara and saying, "If only you hadn't gone to cheer ...?" I'm really serious. It is completely unfair of you to put any of the weight of this situation on kids.
They've already had a piece of their childhood stolen. Even if you live in an area where the number of cases is low, things are different. I honestly think the kids are all going to be okay, in part because what's been taken from them is unknown to them and because they will adapt, but don't take more by putting decisions in their hands.
Just stop.
And don't use "Well, my kids really want to ..." as your excuse for why you're doing something that you know very well may not be safe. It's not fair. It's not right. It's time to put on your grown-up pants and make decisions.
We can all agree that it sucks making those decisions, but here we are. We're all in it together.