Raising children in tough times

You know, every day that passes by COVID is telling us that this is serious, impacting the elderly. Now it's impacting the children, I think, last I read is that I believe in the state of Tennessee 36% or 29% of people who are contracting COVID. At this point, our children, that's a very, very high percentage at 29% is a very, very high percentage. And now, you know, we were seeing something similar in the hotbar. Today, and that is COVID is not impacting us only physically, but it's also impacting us emotionally as well, as well as our children. And now with the opening of the schools, that just lends itself, you know, the environment for you know, if people are not careful, and they

don't take these matters seriously, I think unfortunately, we will see, we will see more of this. So again, we say, Look, we want to make sure that our kids stay safe, but not at the expense of their emotional well being, meaning that we do not want to create an environment that is full of anxiety. And that is very, very serious. I was

sharing with the brothers today at the hotbar that there was a study that was done by I think it was Alan Glinski from the Work and Family Institute. And they interviewed 1000 children, and they asked these children, if you had one wish that you would be granted about your parents, what would it be? And most of these children that were interviewed, and by the way, they asked the parents the same question. And most parents predicted that the children would want to say that they would want they would have wished that their parents have spent more time with them. And the answer came that we wish that our parents were less tired and less anxious when they were with us. And that is very

telling. Because what happens is when you are tired, when you are anxious, you're just not in the mood. We don't communicate well, we're not we're not as responsive, we're not as enthusiastic, we are not as gentle, we have very little tolerance for irritants, and we're just not very pleasant. At that point. We may be going through burned out and we have got all these issues that are taking, taking place. So the first thing that I would say is please create a relaxed atmosphere for the entire family, especially for our children as much as you can. How do you do this? Call it down with the criticism, you cannot just be critical all the time. And nowadays, because we're spending a lot

more time especially if you're working from home and the kids are going to school from home, man, what happens is that the parents are tense the kids are tense the parents are checking. Is the kid on YouTube? Are they playing video games? Are they paying attention in the class? Are they having technical difficulties, I need to also take care of my work. So there is a lot of tension that is taking place during the day at home right now. And what we want to do is that we really need to just make peace with imperfection. And that is the first the first step in cooling it down with criticism. You've got to make peace with imperfection. We just had sound difficulties, technical

related issues, Internet being interrupted. Kids being bored, you being overworked and burnt out. You've got to make peace with imperfection. Toby at other gathering wanted to redo her stuff One minute.

One more colorful, uh, yeah, maybe Baba, multiple label fill managers with an array. You just can't do that. It's poetry that speaks about you know what life is going to. It's all about ups and downs. And you just expect it to be only upset that your expectations are so unrealistic. And you will continuously be disappointed. So make peace with imperfection. Make sure that you call it down with the criticism and make sure that you create a somewhat safe and relaxed atmosphere where people can just be and the more we do that, I think it'll just help us cope better with whatever it is that is happening right now. And these are difficult times. You're talking about kids not going to school

means not seeing their parents not not not having emotional growth. By the way, there is social development and emotional development that takes place, even when kids are fighting, just learning how to resolve problems, just to learning how to deal with conflict. Just learning how to make friends, keep friends, the whole idea of joking and teasing. This is all part of growth. And a good number of kids are deprived from this right now because of what's going on. And remember kids are not very vocal. So they

I really don't know how to express themselves by words. But what they do is that they act out. And what we want to do is that we just rather than just being too quick to criticize the negative behavior that we see, we just want to say, looks like you need to talk, tell me what's going on. Okay? And just make sure that you create that safe. that safe space. I'll say that really, really important. And then we pay attention, of course, to the whole, you know, safety measures that they are. Be the schools be the CDC, you know, what are the professionals telling us, the experts telling us about how we need to keep us ourselves and our families safe, and I believe that's really, really

crucial.