In this time of COVID-19, millennials rear their children with precision, rituals and caution. Nothing within their control is left to chance.
The safe world in which they once envisioned raising their children has vanished. That’s why routine is paramount and includes rigorous training of all babysitters, including grandparents.
Recently we cared for both of our children’s children. Weeks before visiting the Rhode Island grandchildren during spring break, our son, Sydney, initiated multiple informational calls and sent a color-coded spreadsheet with suggested activities.
In our daughter Rachel’s case, we stayed with the children for an evening while she and her husband went to dinner and the theater in Chicago. She provided a 2 ½-page manual for the two-and-a-half hours we spent with them from day care pickup to bedtime.
Our youngest grandchild is 10 months, so putting him to bed requires an Owlet smart sock, an electric nose suction device, a sound machine and baby monitor. When we couldn’t figure out the Owlet, alarms sounded on both our daughter and her husband’s phones while they were at dinner, which led them to message ours.
The 4-year-old’s bedtime protocol is quite complex. After an elaborate bathing routine, she chooses from three sets of pajamas; picks four books to read; and selects either “Dog” or “Elephant,” a big stuffed animal to sleep with. There’s a choreography to it. You throw the newly chosen sleep mate to her while she throws the previous night’s back to be tucked in the closet. We apparently screwed up that part.
“THAT’S NOT THE WAY YOU DO IT,” she screamed.
After appeasing her, we scurried away.
If these rituals seem rigid, consider how difficult it is to parent now. Beyond anxiety over the virus, anger and fear grow deep. Hope has been wrung out of millennials.
Raised with optimistic books such as “Free to Be You and Me,” and “Growing Up Free: Raising your Child in the ‘80s,” they were programmed to believe in a bright future.
They sat in our laps while we described our marches against injustice and tales of being VISTA volunteers. Their bedtime stories were books about civil rights heroes and first-wave feminists.
Baby boomers were delusionally confident our children would have happier, safer lives because many of our country’s problems were identified.
Civil rights laws were passed, so surely there would be no more voting discrimination. Protests fueled the end of Vietnam, so surely there would be peace. The Supreme Court passed Roe v. Wade, so surely women would never need illegal abortions. Same-sex marriage was legalized, so surely the LGBTQ community would receive acceptance. Rodney King’s beating by Los Angeles police officers drew national outrage, so surely policing reform would happen.
But instead of progressing, our country regressed. Like a boomerang returned with vengeance, social justice initiatives have been felled.
Shocked by 9/11, millennials have been further stricken by social, racial, ethnic and feminist gains crumbling. They live with threats on the right to choose; voter suppression laws; the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor; anti-LGBTQ legislation; systemic racism; banned books; and global warming. And Russian soldiers in Ukraine are killing children.
We might have had Nixon with his 18-and-a-half- minute missing Watergate tape, but they had Trump and 457 minutes of lost phone logs on Jan. 6.
Distrustful of traditional conventions and critical of the government, our children nurture with technology, parent with Google and mark their lives on social media.
Parenting and working during COVID-19 has been soul-crushing with regular closures of day cares and schools. Worrying about the future brings despair.
Yet, somehow, they’re raising children with strength and creativity. Our grandchildren wear masks with aplomb and play with abandon. Will they find the resilience to rectify the wrongs?
Perhaps the constant in this narrative is love and finding comfort through routines.
I recently unearthed directives I wrote for my parents in 1989 when leaving them with our 7- and 2-year-olds. It was less firm than the ones provided to us, but it numbered five pages. There were food instructions: “Good luck. Rachel will throw lettuce at you if you try to get her to eat it.” TV viewing allotments: “One hour per day. Sydney will want to watch ‘Mission Impossible.’ Do not let him!” Bedtime rituals: “Read three pages of one of his nonfiction books or a chapter of ‘Nancy Drew.’ He will take a chess game instead.”
In the evolutionary parenting playbook, leaving the children with grandparents comes knowing they’re the second-best custodians. They are wired through DNA to love and protect. It just takes a little training and a blind belief in posterity.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Christine Ledbetter, a former arts editor at The Washington Post, is a journalist now living in downstate Illinois.
