Do you deserve a sticker?
This week we talk reward charts, teleworking considerations and digital footprints. Also, a bit of help for decision-making in the time of COVID-19.
I have some questions. I assume you do too.
Permit me a quick divergence from ITK’s mission of increasing our tech-savviness by posing the following questions: Should you send your kid to summer camp if it reopens? Should you travel to see your parents this summer? Decision-making was already my least favorite part of being an adult and that was just when I had to figure out what was for dinner. Making these decisions about how and when to resume activities that, until a couple months ago were routine, is now fraught and overwhelming. There is so much information about what to do and what not to do, and the situation is constantly evolving, which makes planning difficult.
Further, recommendations can’t cover every family’s particulars. That being said, in thinking about next steps for our family, I found these three articles helpful:
Grandparents & Day Care: Instead of trying to cover every scenario parents are facing, this article gives readers a framework to work from and a systematic process to make overwhelming questions more manageable.
How to Know Which Risks are Right For You When Reopening Your Life: This article outlines five lifestyles and their inherent risk/rewards as part of a thought exercise to get you to figure out your own comfort-level during re-opening and beyond.
From Camping to Dining Out: Here’s How Experts Rate the Risks of 14 Summer Activities: As the title indicates, this article outlines the potential risks of common summertime activities along with the caveat that all of this depends on the particulars of your situation.
Have you tried virtual babysitting?
With so many companies moving to remote work, employees’ personal and professional lives are beginning to blur. This Protocol article does a great job of outlining the major issues companies and employees will need to address in order to make teleworking a tenable situation; not the least of which is childcare and there’s no app for that.
You Get a Gold Star.
Chances are good that you have, at some point during your time as a parent, employed the ever-popular reward chart as a motivator (e.g. to stay in bed, use the potty, do homework). This week, Working Mom presented a nice companion to these kid charts in the form of the Parent’s Chart. Times are tough; tensions are high and there’s a lot of togetherness going on… perhaps the promise of a sticker at the end of the day can help us all remember to do our best.
Back to Tech.
Are your kids starting to get their own social media accounts? Perhaps you’ve agreed as a result of the necessity of virtual connections, or maybe you no longer possess the bandwidth to be their social coordinator, or maybe their constant pleas have finally worn you down. Whatever the reason, common wisdom is that parents “friend” their kids as a condition of the kid having an account (along with password transparency and other ground rules).
However, have you really thought about what your kid may run into when they start searching your social media footprint? Parenting rants? Past partying pics? This Wall Street Journal article explores the realization that many moms are facing when it comes to being Facebook friends with their teens. In closing, one parent points to the irony of the situation, saying:
At the same time that we’re telling our teens never to post anything they wouldn’t want shared with everyone, we’re realizing we don’t want everything we ever posted to be shared with our teenagers.
For those of us whose kids aren’t on social media yet, now may be a good time to do some digital housekeeping. (As if we don’t have enough IRL housekeeping to keep us busy these days!)
That’s all for now. We leave you with this (from The New Yorker):
