Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1245222
11 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 10 MAY 2020 NEWS tutions should be telling par- ents that they do not need to teach their younger children new material. They should be reassuring them that when kids go back to school, they'll be exactly where they are sup- posed to be." Murphy brings up an ex- ample from Ireland, and the message primary school chil- dren were sent home with fol- lowing the pandemic-induced school shutdown. "They directed the mes- sage to the children and said: We're going to send you some work during the day between 9 and 2 – if you can do it, do it, and if you can't don't wor- ry. More importantly, what we would like you to do is read, help your parents and get lots of exercise… And I thought to myself how lib- erating, how life-affirmative, how supportive." Above all, she says, parents need to trust the teaching professionals and take the pressure off (mostly) women. Time for reflections and dis- cussion Deguara says that now more than ever, there is time for re- flection and discussion. This, she said, may provide more opportunity for positive com- munication and fruitful debate. "It may also create more ten- sion and stress, leading to less respectful interaction. In a pa- triarchal society, much more is needed than a lockdown to solve the problems of gender imbalance. On the contrary, it may worsen the situation. On a national level, the conversation has started, some action has been taken." Murphy advises that women stop being hard on themselves. "We are not superwomen, we cannot be superwomen… So hang up the superwoman suit. In fact, throw it out. Step back, and think about how you can make your life a little easier." She also says that women should stop obsessing over a clean house. "We don't need to have perfect houses. We re- ally don't. We need homes we can relax in, so getting stressed about cleaning and cooking, and maintaining a perfect standard is just extra stress which isn't needed." Don't stay if it is unsafe While marriage is about com- promise, Murphy stressed that if a woman's home life is un- safe, shelters were open and ready. "Ideally it should be the perpetrator who leaves not the victim and the children. How- ever, until the State acts like it and starts enacting the Istanbul convention correctly, where the perpetrator is removed instead of the victim and then children, I would say if you are in a situ- ation where there is violence in the house, don't try to strike a 'better balance': just leave." Deguara echoed those senti- ments, stating that the country had already seen an increase in domestic violence reports since the lockdown, with the majority of victims being women. Which can also be seen from NGOs such as Women's Rights Foun- dation warning that that wom- en have been experiencing an increased level of abuse due to the partial lockdown. "We don't need to have perfect houses.... We need homes we can relax in, so getting stressed about cleaning and cooking is just extra stress" Brenda Murphy And what did you do during the great pandemic of 2020? I guess I am new at the parenting game. A five- year-old daughter in her first proper year of primary school and a three-year-old in kinder- garten are at 'brain-sponge' age, requiring lit- tle more than light-touch schooling. For those parents who need to 'lock down' their children for more intensive remote schooling hours, I envy them not. Solidarity and all that. Even with a reduced-hours scenario, the pan- demic has granted some of us a new lease of life. COVID-19 took out the alarm clock, allowed us to sleep in when at 6am we might be other- wise preparing lunches and beckoning the chil- dren to wake up, and took away the grinding routine of the day: the early morning meetings, the school pick-ups, the drop-offs elsewhere, the family visits... it's been like a holiday from the mundane, the regimen of ugly, modern life. Can't we live like this a bit more? With our so- cial lives on a socially-distanced hiatus, allow- ing us to sift the chaff of familial get-togethers from the wheat? With workmates dealt swiftly by the power of teleconferencing? With less exertion and vehicular displacement, and just more time for ourselves? Surely not. Not with the kids locked inside, their minds addled by the emptiness of televi- sion entertainment and computer games. At least, that's how I have come to see it, even as I cherish the peace of the pandemic and the way it filtered out the cantankerousness of mod- ern-day living. But then, my childrens' lives are unlike what mine was, having been born in the watershed year of 1980 between one generation of X-ers and millennials, a native of both the digital and analogue years. For many like me, the world was a place that had to be negotiated with adults. We did not have 24-hour television channels dedicat- ed simply to cartoons. Cable TV came to me sometime in 1991, but before that, life had to be negotiated with the elders. There was a time for cartoons, sometime early in the morning before school; then right after school finish- es, and of course in the early evening slots af- ter homework would be done. The rest of the hours were for parents to rule supreme over. Consider that the lack of sophistication in the world of video-games or the prohibitive cost of digital entertain- ment, kept children out of homes in search of thrills outside... at a time when the streets were also less taken up by cars. Yet once again, these physical spaces were also negotiated with the activities of the adult world: foot- ball in the street meant moving out of the way of passing cars; hide-and-seek in the neighbourhood meant trespassing though porches and veran- dahs; going out and meeting someone in a pub- lic place was never preceded by a blow-by-blow account of your itinenary on WhatsApp - you would call ahead on a landline to say that you'll meet in a spot at a time, or perhaps, just be at the most popular spot where people hung out in the hope that you'd meet your friends soon enough. Even the landline was another negoti- ated space; you spoke to friends in a common area of the house, with conversations kept to their bare minimum by vigilant and cost-con- scious parents. So what's with the pandemic, anyway? Have not our lives been enriched by broadband, In- ternet, contactless payments, and Netflix? Yes, parents can further delegate their chil- dren's thirst for recreation to the behemoths of entertainment. But will children grow up to never have to worry where their next hour of Nickeledon and Baby Shark is coming from (oh, no they won't, say the real veterans of par- enting)...? My daughter grunts like a teen be- fore letting go the remote control when told her time is up. She then picks up the iPad or pilfers an unguarded mobile phone with You- Tube on it. There are no two ways about it: you cannot expect children to get lost in the wonder of books or the simple act of play if you don't take away the digital opiates, and let them deal with it, cold turkey. (For new parents, the secret is simple: never, ever show the children the wonders of your smartphone). Now that we have spent the last 60 days un- der soft lockdown, have parents like me learnt anything? Yes, children do need the regimen of schooling and the drill of early rising and ear- ly nights. And yes, parents and unions must ask employers (and employers must consent) that workers be allowed to work more from home. My wife may seem to have coped (if she did not, I would be writing with more trep- idation...) but I have had to reckon with the selfless, thankless job of stay-at-home parents (mostly women) who care for their children even while keeping down teleworking hours; also realising that much work can be still done with less desk-banging and more undiplomatic WhatsApp messages. But lockdown lethargy can be dangerous without some proper rules of engagement. And with children (and parents) able to isolate themselves in individual pods of self-curated and unlimited entertainment, the risk is that more of our home life is happening without a sense of collective sharing, of negotiating the hours and spaces we are given with the people we live with. So, now that I see what the pandemic's soft lockdown can do to our digitally-enhanced lives, I do also miss some of the old ways. I do realise we can do away with the cutthroat am- bition, and turn FOMO into JOMO, or as any journalist will tell you, enjoy the stillness of the news cycle (which is a direct product of people doing less shit and just staying at home). But I also want the kids back in school. And to help parents become better at sharing the load. Then maybe, we can start rewriting the rulebook. Matthew Vella