In our latest blog, a colleague from Professional Services talks about the challenges of supporting teenage children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thirteen weeks into home schooling and my 13-year-old son is losing the will to live.
Grateful to live near the coast. The sea is very therapeutic
Up to this point he’s been totally amazing; he gets dressed in his uniform every day and is at his desk by 9am. But today he just lay on my bed and said he couldn’t do it anymore. School work without school is all so boring, so repetitive.
I really am so grateful that my kids are older and I’m not having to juggle 2-year-olds in Teams meetings. But as this lockdown has gone on I’ve realised that parenting teenagers is just as wearing, just in very different ways.
My eldest is about to celebrate her 16th birthday. She should have been doing her GCSEs this summer, but in an afternoon her world was turned upside down and everything was cancelled. Since then she’s steadily retreated and now rarely comes out of her room. She lives in the dark, doesn’t get dressed, isn’t interested in showering. Her friendships have fractured and she cannot get up any enthusiasm for celebrating her birthday.
Our response has obviously been to try and support her every way we can, including finding her a counsellor – who she doesn’t want to talk to. But we persevere.
My most common view of my daughter
Parenting my teenagers in lockdown isn’t about the immediate interruptions a toddler might cause, but there is a constant, anxious strain in the background, a constant worry about their mental health and what the long-term effects of this disease might be.
We’ve settled into a routine where I set my son off on his work in the morning, attend my morning stand-ups and then I try to coax my daughter awake with a cup of tea. Then I come back… and back again… to try to get her to join the sunny world. Trying to maintain some sense of routine and normality, trying to ensure they both eat well, trying to encourage some exercise and human contact, trying to cheer them up and think of different things to do, these are constants in my working day. I have to say that my powers of imagination and persuasion are being tested.
So grateful to have a job I can do so easily from home
I’m so grateful to have a job where I can be flexible with my day. And I’m so grateful to have a job I can do so easily from home. Not commuting two hours every day gives a little time to breathe and it’s often in those times when I would have been commuting that there’ll be a connection with my kids that improves the day – a walk, a cycle ride, a chat over a cup of tea.
Getting the kids involved in the cooking keeps life interesting
At 13 and 16 their worlds should be all about separation, independence, working out who they are in the big wide world, but their wings have been clipped. I just hope and pray that both school and 6th form college start as normal in September; that’s our light at the end of the tunnel.
The Health and Wellbeing team provide a range of advice for staff including team resilience, guidance for vulnerable adults, setting up your home workstation and maintaining positive wellbeing whilst working from home.
