Childcare BC

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

TWO FRIDAYS ago, based on my own 30 years-plus experience, I advised people who were suddenly new to working from home how to do it properly, in the Trinidad context.

In the same spirit, I can give even more desperately needed advice on how to cope with your small children who have been locked into your small flat with you.

So, using the subheading titles of a guide written by one Annette Henderson (newsroom.co.nz/ideasroom) as a springboard, here is my advice for managing small children during lockdown, with necessary amendments to fit Trinidad.

Develop schedules and routines. Better to develop escape routes for yourself. The only schedules any child aged under ten is interested in are those of Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and the Disney Channel. You cannot wean them off cartoons so don’t waste time trying.

The children’s version of real channels, like National Geographic or DiscoveryKids, will only get your hopes up to dash them. Once a television show uses real pictures, small children will not even see them, like cats in front of a mirror, unless they’re real pictures of cartoonish characters, like the Teletubbies.

Make chores a fun, family activity. Yeah, right. Modern children and chores go together as well as Republicans and Democrats. Or phosphorus and water. Make chores fun, my foot! Annette might as well write, “Create life. Allow it to develop over millennia and assess its impact on the Wisconsin supreme court election.” The only way you can make a child under teen age do a chore is to bribe it with sweets. The only chore a small child will do of its own volition is, find the remote.

Children can play on their own and becoming bored is okay. Annette should make a jail for this subhead. Show me a child who can play on his own and I’ll show you a grown man on PornHub. Children can’t play with other children, far less play on their own.

Give anyone under age 15 any electronic handheld device and they can make THAT play in half a second but, if you think you’re going to hand a six-year-old an old car key and they’re going to pretend it’s a rocket, you’re firetrucked; and, if it’s a boy, you’re likely to have a car key in your eye. There’s a reason Fisher-Price, famous for its imagination-stimulating toys, have no products for children aged older than five!

Physical activity is important to maintaining health and well-being. An adult trying to get children to “exercise” in a small flat is like a pastor trying to figure out how to collect his tithes without assembling his congregation in church: it won’t happen, except through the personal intervention of God.

Small children don’t exercise. They go wild. Especially if you tried to bribe them to do chores with sugar. And the faster they move, the louder they scream, and the wilder they get. They’ll turn your living room into one of those motorcycle walls of death. They’ll swing from your good curtains playing Spider-Man and flood the whole place playing “swimming pool” in the shower. But, if they do get moving,

Annette may well be half-right, because YOU will get a great deal of physical activity chasing them. As you pry them from the ceiling, try to imagine you are maintaining your health and well-being.

Every other rubric has been farther off the mark than a Fidel Edwards delivery to Ricky Ponting, but Annette’s last subhead is bang on the firetrucking money.

Use digital media strategically. Yes, Annette, yes! And the only strategy you need is this three-step one:

1. Turn a screen on, any screen at all, doesn’t matter.

2. Plop children in front of it.

3. Go lie down as far away as you can and pray there are no advertisements on whatever the firetruck it might be that the children are watching. With luck, when you wake up, you’ll find covid19 and lockdown were just one long bad dream.

Until you realise you’re on Elm Street.

BC Pires is a child never minder. Read the full version of this feature on Saturday at www.BCPires.com