What Our Kids Learn From Us Being In the World

For many families the 2020 lockdown resulted in chaotic, rough attempts to adjust to work- and schooling-from-home overnight. There was no warning or time to prepare for the transition. Parents of school-aged kids regrouped and somehow managed to prioritize the jobs that kept their families fed, as well as the education of their children all under the same roof.

Some were fortunate enough to be supported by family or neighbors who could help, but other families weren’t so lucky. For some families, the difficult choice to leave work was made to focus on helping kids with online schooling. Still, for other families who had not choice but to keep working, their kids slipped through the cracks as they did the best they could with the options available to them.

If I picked a song to capture the theme of the 2020 lockdown it might be a minor key version of Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down) from the famed Hamilton.

The World Turned Upside-Down

Our lives were turned upside-down, in the best way, two weeks before the lockdown, when our first baby arrived at 4:55 a.m. We didn’t have to scramble to figure out how our kids would attend virtual school with a limited number of computers, but we were still reeling from the shock to our systems that newborns naturally give their parents.

I’ll admit I lived in ignorant bliss the nine months prior to the COVID lockdown. When I first learned about the seriousness of the virus upon returning home from the hospital, it felt like I had just climbed out of bomb shelter after 10 years underground only to find more danger.

During that pregnancy, my husband and I anticipated the normal first outings with a newborn—learning to breastfeed in public spaces, screaming babies in the supermarket, asking nosy strangers to please don’t touch the baby— but that’s not at all what we experienced.

When we thought we would be back in church, surrounded by our faith community, we watched services online and received food through closed doors. When we thought we would be trying our hand at eating in a restaurant with a baby, we bought take-out and ate sitting on our couch.

Our family remained isolated and sheltered in place for 18 months, which is over a year for those counting.

Many people, especially those who were parents before the pandemic hit the US, probably judged our cautious measures to isolate during this 18-month period, and in a sense, it was odd. Most parents don’t keep their kids home for over a year before getting back out into the world—in fact, it’s generally encouraged to venture out a month postpartum—but most new parents aren’t faced with a largely unknown, in some cases, deadly virus.

What Would You Do?

In extreme circumstances, you do what you can to keep your family safe and healthy with the information and resources available to you. Bringing home a fresh-from-the-oven newborn we chose to be more cautious in our approach.

As we wandered through the wilderness of this unknown territory, I wondered how this would affect our son. Would he lack certain social skills because we’d never been able to take him to church or the grocery store or Panera Bread down the street? Would this experience have lasting effects we couldn’t even anticipate for him?

At every turn, every decision, I questioned if we were doing the right thing. My thoughts went from we’re going to ruin this child by being so cautious, straight to but he’s a newborn with literally no defenses to protect him, except to isolate.

Back and forth the pendulum swung in my brain as we continued to live our quiet life inside our home.

About 15 months into the pandemic my husband and I began the conversation, is it time to come back out? These conversations were fueled by a deep desire, a longing to be with the people of God again, an aspect of my faith I never realized meant so much to me until it was all but gone.

We decided the best course of action was a test-run outing to Target, where our son got to ride in the shopping cart. He looked around at the lights and shelves full of more things than he’d ever seen in his life, hands gripped tight around the handle.

Going to the grocery store became solely my responsibility during the pandemic, a chore I didn’t quite mind as it got me out of the house. I will never agree that grocery shopping is a form of alone time for moms. It’s simply a different aspect of our job not performed in the house. Walking through Target with my husband and son became my new favorite thing. It was fun to get out of the house with the whole little family!

A Different World Outside

I realized there was a whole different world to this parenting thing that we never got to experience that first year, going and doing with your kids.

It’s very different parenting exclusively behind closed doors than it is parenting an over-excited or melting down toddler in a grocery store. When we reintegrated into a more normal way of life, it wasn’t just an adjustment for us as individuals relearning how to be in public places again. We had to relearn how to be parents.

Parenting in your home is a much kinder way to go, where you aren’t subjected to the withering gaze of the older woman in the check-out line as your toddler shrieks his disapproval at being told no again. Heaven help you if your child throws themselves to the floor.

My son is two and a half now, and we recently celebrated my birthday by eating inside a Carrabba’s Italian restaurant. I spent nearly the entire dinner getting a bite of creamy shrimp pasta halfway to my mouth and then quickly lowering my fork to either spear more mac n’ cheese for my son or keep him from knocking over a glass of Dr. Pepper.

As my mother let him gulp down her last glass of sweet tea from her lap (his second full glass of the drink), she looked up at me across the table and said, “This is real parenting.”

Opening the Door to New Things

In many ways, the life you live with your kids behind the closed doors of your home are too important to be overstated. We lay the foundation of who our children will be, how they will perceive themselves and the world (or themselves in the world), and what they will believe.

Before we re-entered, one baby step at a time, into normal living with our son, it never occurred to me that our kids learn just as much about who we are in the world by watching us interact with it, with the people queued up with us in line, with the neighbors down the street who practice a different religion, or with the people in our lives who are more difficult and exhausting to deal with at all.

It’s difficult to openly subject yourself to the uncomfortable stares and comments of strangers when taking your toddler or teenager out into the world. If only one lesson remains from the pandemic experience, I hope it’s this one: we can’t live our lives shut away from the world if we ever expect the next generation to change it for the better.

What good is it to teach my son about the love of Jesus, if I never give him the example of sharing it with others? Re-entry into society after all this time is weird and clunky, like the first time you wear a band uniform for marching band, all black wool, tall socks, and sweat.

In the discomfort of finding our footing we’ll teach our kids the importance of coming back from a blunder, the risk of putting yourself out there, and the beauty all around us.