Has COVID-19 Put Greater Responsibility On Parents To Educate Their Kids?

You probably suspect that the title of this piece is a rhetorical question. Perhaps this accurately represents your thought process: “You’re not really asking if this is the case! You’re asserting that it’s the case! The subtitle gives it away.” If so, you’re quite right. It doesn’t take much investigation to confirm that the education process has become far more parent-heavy this year.

When schools close and lockdown procedures are rolled out, there are four options for kids: learn through online tuition, learn independently, learn from their parents, or don’t learn at all. Online tuition is a reasonable path, but it can be tough to get kids to pay attention at the best of times, so expecting them to follow the rules of fuzzy video tutors isn’t particularly realistic.

Learning independently can work for brief periods, but won’t last long before YouTube and video games enter the picture and soak up all the limelight. And simply throwing in the towel with a concession that kids won’t learn anything outside school may be understandable in a sense, but it’s deeply unfair to give up on education at such a critical juncture.

That leaves one viable tactic for parents who’ll do whatever they can to support their kids: take charge of the education process and try to pick up the slack left by hampered school systems. In this post, then, we won’t answer the titular question. Instead, we’ll examine this responsibility, considering what parents can do to educate their kids from home — and what they can’t do.

Parents can curate online resources…

One of the biggest things most parents can do at this point is help with curating the educational resources available online. This applies both during conventional school hours and outside of them. There are so many free guides and tutorials covering just about all the topics you can imagine, but they vary wildly in quality and relevance.

Notably, parents don’t need to be experts in particular fields to usefully curate resources. Instead, they can conduct research. They can communicate with school representatives, connect with other parents, and draw upon the myriad websites set up to assess educational resources. Having a backlist of tasks worth doing is a great way to provide support.

...And source offline resources to some extent

Here’s the issue with offline resources: they’re costly. While parents can find so many useful things online, they need to purchase any physical educational resources they use (things like textbooks, activities, and pieces of equipment). And in the midst of a pandemic that’s destroyed so many businesses and caused a global recession, it’s hard to justify wild expenditure.

The best option is to spend carefully, investing money only where it’s going to make the most difference. Multi-faceted resources are the best, and many are available through monthly subscription boxes for kids. Some activity sets — like subscription boxes by Sago Mini Box — are built around specific themes but feature various challenges that can make them useful for weeks (if not months) before they’re eventually recycled.

Others are more limited but cover broader topics, or concentrate on practical tools like STEM kits. Cratejoy lists a large variety, so parents interested in seeing all the options available should take a look at them and think about what they can afford to spend.

They can plausibly make matters worse

As alluded to earlier, many parents (well, most) won’t be experts in relevant fields, meaning they can’t usefully weigh on the topics being covered. In fact, they can make things worse by passing on their own mistaken impressions. They can also make things worse through failing to achieve the necessary structural discipline, though it’s harder to blame them for that.

It isn’t just that they lack experience as educators. It’s also that they don’t want to be perceived as villains (and need to be cordial with their kids outside of education hours), and are thus reluctant to be strict with their kids during such a stressful time. When you’re stuck at home and possibly out of work during a pandemic, the last thing you want is for your kids to hate you.

In the end, disciplinary matters are complicated, and parents who’ve home-schooled their kids for years can still struggle with them. Accordingly, there’s only so much that even the most committed parents can do to help their kids learn during this miserable year — with part of that being due to a major issue that we’ll touch upon next.

The social component is a huge loss

More than anything else, it’s the loss of consistent social activity that’s the problem with schooling during the COVID-19 era. Even kids who aren’t particularly social benefit from being among their peers, and as much as adults have suffered from isolation, kids are struggling to a much greater extent. We really don’t know how this will affect them in future years.

Outside of directly covering education, then, parents must do what they can to help their kids engage in social activity, whether it’s through virtual gatherings (though technology will never suffice) or through safe in-person meetings. This certainly isn’t easy, as adults are having enough difficulty dealing with their own social issues — but it’s inarguably important.

Schools must adapt (and quickly)

Even if parents do everything they can to help their kids through this time, they simply don’t have the resources and expertise to provide suitable educational frameworks. Accordingly, the responsibility that has been thrust upon them must be removed as soon as possible, and that doesn’t mean reopening schools whenever possible (only to close them again shortly after).

Instead, it means adapting to the new state of the world, and accepting that things aren’t going to return to normal for a long time. Courses must be updated to factor in remote working. Alternatives to traditional tests should be found. Arrangements must be made at a government level to ensure that kids can get enough social activity without being endangered.

If school systems throughout the world don’t face reality and change how they do things as a matter of utmost importance, the damage that has been done so far might only be a sign of things to come, and future generations might be left woefully unprepared for what lies ahead.