We all have different ways to cope in the many phases we go through not only now, but in any situation. At the moment, we try to find a new normal every day. Some days seem almost surreal, and at times we just wish that the day will be over, other days we wish that certain moments would last longer.

A dear friend shared a picture on facebook, which said that during these times, the days of the week all seem the same. It feels like there is no Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday etc. but only a yesterday, today and tomorrow. Days are very similar, yes, and although we still have meetings and appointments and are aware that the days in the week differ in names and schedules (to some extent), they feel the same because it all happens from the same place: home. At least for some of us.

We are fortunate that this time of isolation gets somehow interrupted by Easter. The Guardian published an article where they ask readers to share how they are celebrating Easter in lockdown, and you can read other newspapers in the Netherlands , Germany, Switzerland, UK etc. In Italy, they indicate where people can follow the messa di Pasqua online.
On TV there are commercials talking about this Easter being different because families can’t meet in person.

Our children seem to need more than ever a sign of hope and normalcy, and Easter is one of the moments in the year that gives us hope every single year.

This year we won’t celebrate it, like planned, in Italy and Switzerland, we’ll celebrate it at home instead. We will decorate our home, have a long skype session on Sunday with our family in Germany and Switzerland, and enjoy the time with each other here. It’s not the first time that we spend Easter without our extended family. For internationals and expats this is nothing new. But still: knowing that you can’t even if you would like to, is what makes a huge difference. The freedom to decide yourself is taken from us this year, and maybe this is why we long for it even more.

We try to keep our minds busy by binge-reading, writing a lot (like I just did in the past days…), and binge-watching Netflix series. Celebrating Easter is becomes a new meaning this year because we long for a new beginning, we long for this all being over soon in the best possible way for our dear ones and for us.

Some parents might think that teenagers don’t really like to celebrate Easter. In Italy there is a saying “Natale con i tuoi, Pasqua con chi vuoi” (“Christmas with your family, Easter with whoever you want (=usually it means friends)”), but this year is different.

All celebrations become more important right now because we are more aware of what it means to celebrate in a more isolated way. Our children miss their friends and family even more… Easter invites to contemplation and there is a positive side of it in celebrating in a more calm and personal way: “In der Ruhe liegt die Kraft” (= the strength is to be found in serenity).

I wish you and your family and friends a healthy Easter, no matter if you celebrate it with your core family, with your partner only (because your children live abroad) or if you are alone this year: bake or cook something delicious, enjoy nature if you can, listen to some good music and enjoy the colors of this season.

Here is a little virtual tour to the Keukenhof here in the Netherlands.

We will watch Andrea Bocelli on Easter Sunday, and his Music for Hope live streaming from the Duomo di Milano – would you like to join us in a virtual way?

How are you celebrating Easter this year?

#wereallinthistogether #stayhomestaysafe

Chia Suan Chong, an English language teacher who has made her mark on the field of ELT internationally and who is an inspiration to a lot of teachers, and author of Successful International Communication, held a brilliant webinar Doing the Communicative Approach Online: Motivating students to speak, where she explains how to motivate and keep students motivated when holding online synchronous lessons, i.e. face to face in real time.

Remote learning is not home schooling!

Keeping teenagers focused and engaged when learning remotely is not the same as home schooling!

Some parents had the impression they would need to become teachers in order to help their children keep on track, but this is not the case when we talk about remote learning. During remote learning, teachers and educators are still in charge of providing the necessary input and support to the students.

Although younger children might need some more support from their parents – either to set up the computer or device they need to work with, or with staying focused – older children rather need to learn to not get distracted and get side tracked by chats with friends, gaming, tiktok’ing etc.

Having a clear schedule and routine helped many families make it possible for their children to keep on studying. I know that families with children with special needs had to face many more hurdles! Especially when the parents needed to get some work done at home too. I heard though that some schools who already provided support for these students, also had special educators take care of them remotely.

How to improve even more…

What many schools and teachers need to consider though during COVID19 is that studying at home with all the family under the same roof, requires other routines and demands another kind of concentration from our children. Especially when they need to share the same table, room and sometimes computer…

I observe that schools have adapted the daily schedule and are not requiring children to sit in front of their devices for 6-8 hours in a row, but prefer quality over quantity.

Three or four hours per day is enough for a school aged child and student to study through an online device. – Our children also need time to process what they are learning independently, and they need to get the chance to apply and exercise what they’ve learnt.

And, how Chia Suan Chong mentions in the video, it is important to vary in the style of teaching and keep everyone engaged.

Connecting online … and offline

Teenagers who are familiar with learning online already to some extent, this change in the last weeks hasn’t been a big challenge. Obviously they miss their friends and the daily interactions with them, but they can “meet” via facetime, skype, zoom or other platforms. In times of social distancing in real life, we all use to socialize more online, and we should be thankful for having this option. I am very much aware that this online socializing is not possible for every child around the world right now, and I wonder how they are coping with this. A friend who lives in a country where the internet connection works only every now and then and only during a few hours per day, told me that they are spending time on the balcony, chatting with neighbors and those who take walks in the street. For the rest, they can’t do much more than playing board games, read books and draw, do what I think we all would have done should this pandemic have happened 20 or 25 years ago.

I hope your teenagers are all doing well and found a way to make the best out of this situation. – Keep safe & healthy, and #stayhome.

My questions for you:

• Do you know if the children who need some more support in your school received it also when they had to start studying from home?
• How was this organized?
• What would you suggest could have been done differently in your specific case, for your child and situation, to guarantee remote learning?

Life is not a long fleuve tranquille , we all have our challenges to deal with. What helps me since my own teenage years is Nietsches’ What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. – I admit that sometimes I wonder how strong does one need to become?!
Fact is, that I am very proud of where we are now. – Be prepared, this is a long post…

We parents learn a lot from our children

We learn more from our children than from any parenting book. This is something I love about being a parent! It is the hardest job and it doesn’t come with a course book, or a guarantee for success. It is the most amazing journey but also the most daunting one. It is a 24/7 job.

Our children teach us to slow down, to focus on every-single-step, they actually teach us mindfulness, and they teach us to question our values and beliefs (over and over again!). What I love the most is that they teach us to be flexible and coherent at the same time. It seems impossible but it’s not!

Every step our children take, we have the great chance to admire and enjoy it. Unfortunately, many of us parents tend to get caught into a rat race, where it is more about whose child speaks first, walks first, eats solid food first, gets into the gym team (first), has higher grades, gets accepted into the most prestigious University, has the best job, earns more money etc.

I say unfortunately, because we risk to loose our children along the way.

We think what is good for them and tend to guide them with such a determination that they naturally follow our lead.

It starts with putting them on the jacket (maybe I’m warm…), choosing the right shoes for them (I prefer the other ones…), convincing them about the importance of maths and science (there are other subjects too…!), that it is good to try out numbers of sports (and if I don’t like sports, or those you suggest?…), be consistent in one (why only one?!). And no, we’re not helicopter parents.

“We just want what is good for our children” is what many parents say.

But, honestly, how do we know what is good for them? What makes us be so sure that the path we see (and choose!) for them is the one that is good for them? Who are we to make them do things they are not ready or prepared for, or willing to do? – Whoever says that we’re doing this because we want that our children don’t have to experience certain situations, is not doing them any favor!

Our children will make their own experiences, at their time, with their pace and with their consequences.

If we, parents, recognize patterns in situations or behaviors, that can lead to consequences that were hard for us: it was about us, not them!

I don’t mean that we don’t learn from experiences, we do, and we learn a lot from history, from the past – I am the first to say that history is one of the most important subjects taught at school (and beyond) – but we have to take experiences as what they are. They are things-that-happened-in-certain-circumstances-with-particular-consequences: they are not universal law. They are somewhere on a continuum from objective to subjective that is very difficult to define and to sum up in a post. And this is exactly what makes parenting so difficult: when should we draw the line between our experience and the one of our children? How much should we guide them? And what does this even mean?

I’m one of those mothers who don’t push their children.

In the past, I let my children decide what jacket to put on, I don’t push so they go to the highest maths group, and I don’t push them to go to university.

I don’t care what other parents think. I don’t care what my parents think about the way I’m raising my children. I make many mistakes, but I have no problem to own them. I apologize to my children when I do. They know that I am not perfect and that I don’t know everything. Since they were very young I would say “I don’t know, let’s find out together”, and I am sure this made them not consider adults as know-it-all – and lead them quite often to question adults (teachers and educators too).

I spent days (and nights) thinking about what kind of consequences my decisions might have, and what consequences my childrens’ decisions might have.

I’m not a laid back mother. I worried a lot in the past, especially because I didn’t have parents who would take care of our children. We live too far away and my parents are not the kind who would offer to take care of our three children so that my husband and I could have some time “off” parenting. I know many expat families can, but we couldn’t.

I know now that I was anxious at times, and that this reflected in my parenting style. But what I recently discovered is, that my anxiety wasn’t coming from me, it was coming from the expectations of our society, our community, our extended family and friends. When I realized this a few years ago, I decided to let me guide by my children.

I am growing with my children

Yes, I am literally growing with my children. They show me the way. They show me what they like, what they dislike, what makes them happy, what makes them anxious (yes, we dealt with some serious anxiety issues in the past) and what helps them recover from setbacks.

What I have learnt in the past years is that the more I let my children decide and deal with the consequences, the better we all are off. We discuss a lot about the decisions. But instead of anticipating our children with possible consequences of their decisions, we ask them what they think a consequence could be, we explore them together and we let them make their own experiences.
Sometimes it is better to not mention a negative outcome, because we could spoil the opportunity for them to actually have a very positive experience!

The growing with my children also means to let them go. The first steps that took them further away from me/us when they were toddlers are now leading further and further away, but I am happy for them that they have the confidence and the capacity to do so.

I also grow with them because I don’t want to grow apart from them. My lovely three teenagers show me every day what they can do, what they want, what they fear and what they love: and this changes regularly.

This flexibility is healthy for them and for me. I don’t like putting people in boxes, define them based on their capacities, preferences, etc., so, this flexibility helps me to always consider all the options my children (and I!) have. – It is an amazing journey that my husband and I are very grateful to be able to experience!

(This was in 2019…)

Update in 2021

We have had a surreal year, determined by the many uncertainties of the pandemic, many losses and many moments of frustration, loneliness and desperation. As I mentioned before, our children should be allowed to have the opportunity to make their experiences, make mistakes, be happy, sad, fail and get up again. This past year has asked a lot from all of us: to be patient for what seems an eternity, to follow rules (when rules were not respected by others), to stay positive (although “staying negative” with regards to the pandemic meant to keep distance from friends, family etc.), to “soldier on” (whilst nobody could give any direction where we were and still are (!) headed).
What seemed something that could end in a few months, is not going to end soon, and our children have changed a lot due to the pandemic. They have learned what being lonely is.
They have learned to adjust to the ever changing expectations from school: on- and off-line teaching, teachers struggling with the all so many online channels through which they transmitted (or thought to transmit) their knowledge, they did their best to understand that the curriculum seemed more important than their sanity, tried to make sense of time tables changing every few months. And then there was that uncertainty concerning final exams in the middle of all of this.

Our friends changed: there are those who still check in with us, and those who have become oddly silent. For us adults it is easier as we have “been there” (i.e. been teenagers), but for our children it’s not. They should be making their experiences themselves, and instead they watch Netflix series about it, discussing about what they would do if… in a future (“far far away…”) they were in a similar situation.

This pandemic has taken away a year of healthy social interactions for our children in a phase where they shouldn’t stay home all the time. Someone compared it with times of war, but it’s not comparable. In times of war, people would still be able to see friends, hug, form relationships etc. It’s not the same now.

This past year I have experienced so much wisdom from my children. They reminded us to put on the mask, to stay one more step away from the neighbour, to wash hands. They are very conscious and disciplined. They have also suffered when seeing peers meeting in groups whilst numbers of infections were getting up. Realizing that this world is full or irresponsible people is not reassuring for a young adult! On the contrary. It makes you doubt about the world’s sanity. In those moments we looked at the broader picture and actually wished so many times to live in a more group oriented society, where individualism, the individual’s right wasn’t the first thing people would think of. We looked at history, how people have dealt with this kind of situations in the past, how it would have been different if this had happened only 10 years ago. We learned to keep being optimistic and to not let us distract from what others do, how others think about it and what other people’s expectations are (with regards to their personal freedom).
We have learned a lot about ourselves and about our family. Our children have grown, matured this year, but managed to balance their sadness and lonely moments with moments of joy, shared silliness and laughter.

What about you? How was it for you this past year?

What are you learning from your children? – Please let me know in the comments here below!