Relearning Parenting Amid COVID

In sports, you can have success and even win a championship by having a “system,” which is to say a way to approach the game that allows you to assert your dominance over your opponent.  Maybe it’s playing fast, maybe it’s going big, maybe it’s trickery.  Whatever the system, for a game and even a season you can impose your will on others and end up winning it all.

Over the long haul, though, systems don’t make dynasties.  And that’s because the league adapts, a key player gets hurt, or in some cases weather conditions, rule changes, and other outside forces limit your ability to run your plays.  Which means the truly dominant teams are ones with the adaptability to be resilient amid an ever changing landscape.  They can win when the sun is shining and in the driving rain, when the pace is fast and when it grinds to a halt, when all cylinders are clicking and when your star is having an off-night. 

I’ve thought about this a lot parenting through the pandemic.  Pre-COVID, I would’ve patted myself on the back for being a pretty good parent.  It turns out I’m just a system parent.  And with the system all gummed up, my parental flaws have been exposed, just like a seemingly unstoppable sports team felled by an unlikely underdog because something wasn’t as it usually is.

Without the restrictions of COVID, I’m a darn good parent.  And that’s because I can pick my spots, and interact with my kids from a place of sanity and strength.  Their schedules are full with school and extra-curriculars, they’re getting ample educational and social stimulation, and the routine of it is comforting even if demanding and grueling.  Indeed, it is precisely because it is demanding and grueling that they’re being sharpened, they’re giving their all, they’re stretched and supported and strengthened.

And in that context, I can shine.  I can handle the logistics of their schedules and needs because they are fixed and pre-determined.  I can come alongside their experiences and lessons, and supplement where they’re growing through a light touch of a question here, silence there, a little support here, a firmer rebuke there.  Perhaps most importantly, given how busy the non-parental part of my life is, I can pick my spots, having these interactions on my schedule and on my terms.

In the midst of an endless stay-at-home season, with nothing but uncertainty and restriction ahead of us, none of the conditions I now realize I need to be a good parent are in place.  It is exposing me as a system parent, rather than someone who can be a good parent in all seasons and all conditions. 

And it is exposing how I define being a good parent.  For parenting, even for us modern two-working-parent households, shouldn’t be about efficiency and productivity.  But when those things go out the window and I assess my parenting as not good, it shows that that’s what I’m self-evaluating.  Not compassion or availability or empathy or affection or passion or tenderness or any number of characteristics that if we stop the world from spinning for a second we would say are what characterizes good parenting. 

Maybe other are different, but parenting alongside everything else that’s in my life has involved a severe compartmentalization of emotions and responsibilities and interactions.  Pre-COVID, those compartments fit nicely alongside each other, and I maintained my sanity while my kids did alright with a little help from me along the way.  In the midst of all of our current craziness, there are no compartments, just a bunch of people stuck together trying to cope with the uncertainty and fear and loss of it all.  It is a situation that calls not for efficiency or productivity, but compassion and availability and empathy and affection and passion and tenderness and many other things. 

In sports, systems teams that experience success and then get their butts handed to them are faced with a painful reckoning.  The league has caught up, the system doesn’t work when certain conditions aren’t in place, the window of our magical run is closing.  Rebuilding is all the rage, and the stigma behind it is fading.  But rebuilds are still hard. 

Going from thinking I’m a good parent to realizing I’m a system parent who needs to rethink and rebuild is quite a reckoning.  Thankfully and unironically, we needn’t be efficient and productive in this evolution.  Our kids rely on us for their healthy development.  But they are resilient.  We don’t need to be perfect.  We do need to try a little hard at compassion and availability and empathy and affection and passion and tenderness.  These things come easier to others than to me.  But I am trying, and I am trying because I know my kids will be better for it.  And that makes it all worth it.