When a tantrum-prone cherub of a 2-year-old informs you that she would like to go to the park, you must do everything within your power to get her to the park. If you can’t, you’ll likely endure a prolonged bout of aggressive, reverberative screaming and flailing that will forever serve as a reminder that going to the park isn’t really a request—it’s a demand. I learned this over the summer in a time when going to the park, or going anywhere at all, looked different than it had in over 100 years.
Me: “Hey peanut, what do we do when we get to the park?”
2-year-old: “No touching other kids, no-touch other kids or go too close!”
I’m a nanny. I spend a lot of time covered in fingerpaint and boogers that are not my own, carrying plastic baby dolls and singing, cheering, tooting train toys, and generally making myself look silly at the behest of tiny children. But I love it, and I love being around kids. The children I work with are incredibly perceptive. They see things I have forgotten to look for and love things I have been taught are not “valuable” within productive society. When the COVID-19 pandemic left so many without a job, I felt blessed that I could find work as a nanny in Denver.
Nannying at any time is something of a strange task. Taking care of other people’s children is always a huge responsibility, but during a pandemic, there is a whole new host of concerns I had never needed to consider before—most prominently, the lack of playdates and camps and random encounters at the park that allow children to make friends. In my experience, social interaction is incredibly important for young kids, and those I had cared for in the past loved the company of others their age. Their ability to form connections and community is so special to watch. After a kid-filled summer during this pandemic, I realized that I’d seen very little written on children’s perspective, despite the plethora of articles on “how to deal with” children during this tumultuous time.
How are the youngest members of our society thinking about and processing COVID-19? I decided to ask. The following are a series of interviews I conducted with kids I have worked with— socially-distanced, outdoors, and with masks— or online through surveys sent to families from my local elementary school and churches in southeast Denver. This group of around 20 kids from my area attempts to unpack what it means for them to exist during a pandemic.
Me: “What is COVID-19?”
8-year-old: “Is a sickness that is shaped like a sphere with spikes on it”
5-year-old: “It’s just basically like a disease”
5-year-old: “Staying home”
7-year-old: “It is a pokey ball that can kill you”
When I heard these descriptions, I found myself nodding along—maybe they aren’t wrong. I don’t know whether I could answer much better myself. To the kids I interviewed, COVID-19 is a mysterious critter that we can only catch blurry glimpses of, but never fully see. These kids seem to know that they are missing something here, that we are all missing something. They see a computer rendering of a prickly-looking, mysterious beast, and they don’t know what to do with that information. A lot of the kids I talked to are young enough that they haven’t been exposed to the New York Times maps flooded with tiny red spikes and dots, and haven’t experienced the full extent of grief and destruction those maps have come to represent. Instead, they just know they are staying home and maybe that’s better.
Even if they’re not getting complete information, however, they understand that the “pokey ball” is having major impacts on how they live, what their families look like, when they see their friends, whether they’re going to school. And when asked, they seemed to want to share that understanding. I resonated with the ways in which their answers weave across the canyon carved out by COVID-19’s destructive forces.
Me: “Has the pandemic changed your life? And if so, how?”
(5-year-old): “Yes, it has changed my life because now we are wearing a bunch of masks”
(7-year-old): “Yes, Daddy’s working at home now”
(6-year-old): “There’s a lot of extra rules and things at school”
(5-year-old): “Yes, ‘cause quarantine and staying home”
Me: “What do you like about quarantine?”
(5-year-old): “I liked that I didn’t have to play with Carver all the time” (Carver is their big brother’s best friend)
(8-year-old): “I like that I have more time to spend with Daddy”
(5-year-old): “I like that I can get two screen times each day”
Me: “What don't you like?”
(3-year-old): “NO HUGS!”
(6-year-old): “That I didn’t get to play with my other friends that are good friends”
(9-year-old): “I don’t like that there are a lot of extra rules at school. I don’t like that people aren’t really wearing their masks a lot. I don’t like that Evan, at school, doesn’t social distance in line.”
(5-year-old): “I don’t like that I can’t be in big groups”
Me: “Is there anything you miss from the time before COVID? Why do you miss it?”
(2-year-old): “Hold hands? And touch other kids at the park”
(5-year-old): “I miss my house and friends in Texas”
(8-year-old): “I miss the part of first grade that wasn’t at home”
(7-year-old): “I missed our car when we didn’t ever go in our car.”
(5-year-old): “Being in big groups, like going to movies and stuff”
These kids can quickly articulate what many of us fumble trying to express. The children I talked to know that COVID-19 has changed their lives; they miss their friends and going to school. They are finding joy in moments with their families and observing the ways that not being able to see people can be a blessing. These children want to travel, drive, hug, play, and just be human. By speaking with these kids, I wanted to highlight their resilience beyond the stress of school reopenings and the narratives regarding 'dealing with children during COVID-19’ that I saw in the media. So often I saw kids depicted in ways that failed to honor their voices. Kids are addressed only as background noise, but in this noise, they serve as main characters in their own important stories. It is imperative to note that the kids I spoke to are often in stable living situations and thus, this series of interviews does not remotely adequately address the plethora of inequitable ways COVID-19 is changing, challenging, and harming young kids and adolescents. Though I do not believe this piece can fully highlight the brilliance of the children I spoke to, or the importance of childhood perspectives in broader conversation, I hope that it could highlight some of the ways children are thinking about the pandemic. Ultimately, the summer I spent around baby dolls, applesauce, and long fights about socks has taught me much about the importance of childhood narratives and what the pandemic might look like when you’re looking up at it.
Pandemics | October 2020