This year COVID let up a little but the flu came back with a vengeance. Children that were sheltered during the pandemic seemed to get all the viruses at once: Covid and its various mutations, the flu, the common cold, the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and the novovirus, to name a few.
So how did parents cope with this new reality – where kids seemed to not only get sick for a longer time but also more often? We asked some parents at Rawlinson Community School to find out more about the impact of this year’s flu season on Midtown parents of school-age kids.
How did you manage work and taking care of the kids?
“If the kids were home (sick) when I was trying to work, we would use TV as much as possible. I think that’s the big answer.
“Wincing was how I survived, because it was awful. Like, when the two kids were home (sick), and you were trying to work, it’s impossible. Oh, and I used up the vacation days, that was the other way.
“I bought (my four-year-old son) masks recently because he got sick in December. I gave them to him, but I don’t really know if he uses them all the time. He tells me he uses them sometimes, and sometimes not.”
“So, we were really lucky. Our kids did get sick with a bunch of respiratory illnesses, but in the fall. So, when everyone else was getting sick in November, December and then into January, our kids were mostly fine.”
What’s the New Normal for you?
“Before Covid, I had my mom to help. Now we don’t call my mom, because we don’t want to see them and expose them to germs, because my dad is not well. So, we see them less and we don’t get the help.
“If we were really sick, that would be one path, which is easy, you cancel everything and stay home. But I find it stressful when you’re just a little tiny bit sick. So, you have to make these grey calls, which are difficult. This grey area is what I find harder.”
“The biggest difference is that I’m more obsessed with disinfectants nowadays. That dries out your skin, it’s not great. But I use (hand disinfectants) every hour, I’m used to it now. At the beginning of the pandemic, they would tell you to disinfect, and that just stuck with me. That’s what marked me from the pandemic.
“When (my son) gets home nowadays, I send him to shower. I tell him ‘You can’t even hop on the bed’. He knows when he gets home, he has to shower. Because of all the germs in school. I manage it that way so we can protect ourselves.”
“The biggest difference was that we were very social with (my son), we would see lots of people, go to parties, he would get passed around and sit on people’s knees, as a baby. He’s a very social kid, he’s not afraid of strangers, he likes meeting new people. Our daughter, she was born in April 2020, so for the next six, eight months of her life, she didn’t see anybody but us. So, it takes her a lot longer to warm up when she meets a new person. So, I think (she’s) on very early stages of being socialized.”
