Children Are Our Future
Summer has wound down, and that means the school year is upon us. My memories flash back to the hot Houston falls of my youth, when it was not uncommon for us to attend class barefoot until close to Thanksgiving. Those were, of course, very different times, especially when one considers the shadows under which this school year begins. With this in mind, we’re turning today to reflections from my co-writer Elliot Kirschner, a parent of young children. Here at Steady, in our notes and in your comments, we hope to share a variety of viewpoints and perspectives. I think you will find this one thought-provoking. I know I did.
- Dan
“Why should I have toys if I don’t have anybody to play with?”
The question from my soon-to-be nine-year-old daughter hit me hard. With the delta variant surging, with school about to re-open, we had redoubled our efforts to keep our too-young-to-be vaccinated little girl out of harm’s way. How can we weigh the odds of what is safe? How do we try to see through the fog of so many unknowns? We relented. Masks on, windows open, your friend can come over to play — indoors, with your toys.
The two girls spent hours doing just that, changing the clothes on dolls and refitting the Legos. There was not even a faint hint of longing for a screen. In the kitchen, as I juggled zoom calls and writing, I could hear the rise and fall of the chatter from the living room. There were bursts of phrases and questions, swells of energy, and sometimes a very satisfying silence, save for the sound of occupied hands. It struck me. I had forgotten the sounds of kids at play. I count that as another cost of the pandemic.
As a parent of relatively young children ( 7 and 11 when the shutdowns began), I had my concerns from the start about the disruption to their lives. Where we live, the public school closings and the other restrictions came early and threw our family, like all families, into the unknown. We immediately recognized our privilege. We had jobs we could do remotely. We had a roof over our heads that we were not in danger of losing. We had our health. My immediate concern turned to the older people in our lives, our parents, aunts, uncles, family friends, neighbors. As we started realizing the scope of how dangerous this virus was, they were at the greatest risk for the scariest outcomes.
For our family, what started out as a crisis became a routine. As it sank in that we would not go back in person to school, as summer plans got canceled, as we discovered it was safer to be outdoors, our family adapted. And there were some nice benefits - more dinners together, less driving hither and yon, more time it seemed to just be. Again I felt pulled. I recognized our good fortune. My kids would be okay. They are naturally outgoing, not ones to be overlooked in a sea of tiny faces on zoom. We (to be fair mostly my wife) could take the time to help with homework. We would have the resources to make up for deficiencies. My daughters were aware that many were struggling with much worse. They could see it in their online schools — classmates who kept their cameras off because they didn’t want to share the backdrops of their lives, or what else might have been going on in cramped spaces. And then there were the kids who stopped showing up. We talked a lot about how lucky we are.
But at the same time, I couldn’t help but also feel the loss. We are close with our families. All four grandparents are alive and none had gone this long without seeing their grandkids. Not by a long shot. I also remembered back to my days in elementary and middle school, how friendships were allowed to shift and morph, how you met someone new in a class and suddenly became inseparable, how you could talk through your hopes and fears at sleepovers, how the world seemed to expand. All that was now out of reach.
Throughout this pandemic we haven’t talked enough about children. And now here we are, at the end of another summer, at the start of another school year, and we have people who should be acting like adults playing Russian roulette with our children’s health. Barring mask mandates for schools? Not reporting cases? I really can’t believe that we have sunk so low with our politics that we need to score points at the expense of our kids. I can’t imagine the pain of parents who live in such places and know what the science demands. How do you try to navigate this madness? Children have no choice but to leave their care and wellbeing to adults, in their households and also in their government. They can’t vote, but they will live the longest with the consequences. It’s a disgrace.
But even for those of us who live in places where we don’t have to contend with this insanity, the uncertainty ahead, the unknowing, the whiplash, is heartbreaking. I ran into the mother of one of my daughter’s friends who also happens to be a kindergarten teacher and she said prepping for this year was much harder than last. She looked exhausted already. Kindergarten should not be a time for fear.
In the summer, when the case rates were going down, we made plans to see the grandparents. Since my wife and I could work remotely, we decamped to my in-laws who have the good fortune of living in Hawaii. This isn’t the Hawaii of fancy resorts and mai tais, it’s daily living, but there is still the beach and the outdoors. And for a while, it all seemed like life was coming back. But then the case rates started to tick up, and then accelerate. By the time we left, the delta variant clouds were firmly overhead. My parents had planned to visit us at our home for a leisurely stretch. They came, but cut their trip short, worried about having to quarantine far from their home. They had some precious days with their granddaughters, but not nearly enough. We have such a deficit on hugs that I fear we will never repay.
Lately it feels as if time may have frozen in some sense, but in other ways it is flying by. My two girls are far different in stature and temperament from when the pandemic began. The innocence of childhood is fast evaporating. I tell myself children are resilient. This generation will be marked forever by this experience. They will share something important in common, even if they have felt it differently. Just as the children of the Great Depression and World War II grew up to change the world, I can see this building a movement of leaders ready to tackle our global problems together. The greatest antidote for the despondency I have felt at times, the steadiness I seek, often comes from being around my children and their friends. There is something special in the youth of today. But I also mourn for the young lives that will be marked with sadness and loss. The kids who have lost parents and family members. The kids who will struggle with lingering symptoms of this horrific disease. The children who just somehow slipped into the numerous cracks that have emerged in our social networks.
When reading to my children, there is always some comfort that comes in counting the pages until the end of a chapter or measuring our progress through a thick book. But with this pandemic, as I guess with life in general, we still have no idea how this story ends or how far away we are from getting there. We must adapt, constantly. And I guess that is the ultimate life lesson our children are getting. I just wish I had more control over how and when they would learn it. But still, I reach for hope.
Being a child of the 1980s, watching my own strong young women try to navigate a broken world, I couldn’t help but think of The Greatest Love of All, Whitney Houston’s ode to empowerment and childhood. So I will end with what she can say much better than I:
I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be
— Elliot Kirschner
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Thank you for this beautiful, poignant piece. I have 8 and 11 year old girls starting school on Monday in Salt Lake County, the County that, this past Thursday, overturned our Health Department’s K-6 mask mandate. As a 30-day, age-limited mandate, it was designed to be a compromise to appeal to “all sides”—a shocking reality, to me, when there is only one side one should consider when faced with a deadly pandemic.
I feel bereaved. I feel terror. I feel a love for my daughters that is so big and expansive that to realize the risks posed to them—and to the children whose parents have put us all in this danger—could be so unspeakable that it collapses into a focus of pain intense enough to take my breath away.
My eldest daughter was 21 months old a when a routine surgery resulted in a hospital-acquired multi-drug resistant infection. Within 24 hours of returning home, we were back in the hospital: she had a fever of 106, her rosy cheeks were an unnatural gray, and when she could open her eyes to plead with us, all she would say was “hurts”. Odometer glowing red on her toe, monitors beeping, covered shoes rushing in and out of the room. I asked her surgeon how worried we should be and he wept. I never did get any words in response to that question. It took four days for the scientists working behind the scenes to find an antibiotic that would kill the bacteria without killing our daughter—and it worked. We got lucky.
We tried for four years to have our daughter. Infertility is a pain of its own—and the joy of success is in a singular category, too. Coming *close* to losing a child is the most excruciating *physical* pain I have ever experienced; not only do I never want to experience this again, I never want any human on earth to experience this. Ever.
My only hope is, like yours, that the children whose health and well-being were valued and the children whose were not will grow up to understand what many of the adults now do not: we are all connected. What happens to one if us, happens to us all and when we care for others, not only do we increase their joy, freedom, and health, we increase our own, too.
The present is so painful for me that the only thing helping me through each moment is this hope for the future. I had a strange experience as a teen visiting Paris for a summer with a high school group in 1989: I somehow ended up singing The Greatest Love of All at a street fair and felt a wave of unity so powerful that it has remained one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. The song and it’s meaning drift through me regularly—not because of that experience, but because it is true.
The children *are*’our future.
Heartbreaking. I have 3 grandchildren, ages 10, 7, and almost 3. I live in Vermont, where my 2 older ones live. We have done a very good job up here with this whole thing, but, now, as the first day of school approaches, there's confusion, no masking mandates, and our governor saying, it's a personal choice to wear a mask. Bad time for him to be spiking the ball on the 2 yard line. What galls me is the Republican party, the party that screams how "pro-life" they are, not even seeing the hypocrisy of their actions/inactions. Clearly putting children at risk, and for what? To appease the orange fuhrer? If my grandchildren contract this virus at school, I will go on a rampage. I too, am sad about the "normal" things the kids missed during all of this, but, I think of what they have gained. As Elliot mentioned, there was more family time, more time to teach compassion and empathy towards others. The kids will be fine, eventually, but, I think about the kids who have an alcoholic, abusive parent. I grew up like that, and if there had been a lockdown when I was a child, I might not have survived it. I think about those kids, a lot. I am disgusted by the selfishness, the cruelty, the heartlessness, the apathy, the lack of compassion and a disregard for the mentality that we're all in this together, we can all get through this. What happened to all of that? I'm just sad, for all of us. I hope there's enough of us left in this country of ours, who really care enough about the children, to rise up and tell these want to be dictators, no, enough! I'd like to think that there's more of us than there are of them and we need to start acting like it. That goes for the Democrats in Congress, and in state and local government in every state. They all need to emulate the Texas Democrats, who are fighting with everything they have to save their state. This is a battle, not just for our children's lives and safety, but for our democracy.