COVID Lesson #1
As we continue to hunker down against COVID, I continue to learn lessons from this
stripped-down life.
Here’s one:
Students need attachment figures other than their parents.
You parents who are teaching your kids at home now know this in no uncertain terms. Your kids resist your instruction, your rules and exhortations. They fight you.
Because they’re supposed to rebel against you. They’re supposed to test you.
Putting it very mildly,
children (and teenagers) don’t always take kindly to parental direction.
They don’t always take kindly to teacher direction, either. But, I say, that proves the rule:
Developing people (children, students) (ha! even adults!) need a variety of attachment figures who will
hold them to high, achievable standards
respond to tests and resistance with wisdom and equanimity
have their backs while they struggle through learning and changing
Students need parents and teachers who are whole-hearted developmental partners — that is, adults who are devoted to raising students. To holding them with great care and attention. Ideally, together. In partnership.
Cuz, let’s face it, parents need their children to have other attachment figures, too.
What’s horrifying about this COVID lesson is that, for some children and parents, this distance can make the difference between violence and relative stability.
And, of course, this distance, this safety, comes at uncertain cost to teachers, the essential alternative attachment figures.
So here we are: We are learning from the bare bones of COVID how
deeply interconnected
yet how
fragile
we are.
How can we hold our students, our parents, and our teachers better? Now and in the future?