Life in Lockdown: Parenting edition

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The past few days my toddler has just been a typical toddler but the lockdown makes it feel more stressful. She’s a good kid, it’s just annoying how she’s always getting into things and making a mess and it’s worse than usual as we can’t go out anywhere so she can get her energy out

She’s also obsessed with washing her hands. I block off the bathroom with an old heavy radiator (classy, was putting off investing in a gate as it was working) but now she can move it! It’s bloody heavy so I’m impressed/terrified. Then she goes in there and touches the toilet because she knows that means she gets to wash her hands🤦‍♀️ CBeebies are also drilling into kids the importance of handwashing and every time she sees those segments she keeps signing that she wants to wash hers

Cannot wait until everything opens again, we’ll be going to play groups 5 days a week 🤣
 
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We're surviving with Disney+, Minecraft and Gin. No, really, we are doing some fun* work and today we're making pizza dough. Middle child will be waitress and we've printed off an order form so that she can tick the toppings that we would like on the pizza. (Home economics, English at a push)

I'm not forcing school work but I am trying to educate them in other ways. Baking, gardening, having sensible, grown up conversations instead of yelling at each other 😬

*It's not fun.
 
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I’ve been managing to do a bit of school work and my work most days so far but today I really cba so the tablet is babysitting my 4yo and I’m watching repeats of bake off whilst doing a token bit of work. Tomorrow’s another day. It’s like Sunday everyday at the moment.
 
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Don’t listen to that voice. I’ve been there before (abusive relationship) so I know it’s a struggle but your ex said that to make you feel like tit - you can’t let him succeed years later. You’re doing your best for your son and trying to educate him, you’re obviously not a rubbish mum!
what a terrible thing for a child to say,I know it won't get me any fans but I think Joan Crawford had the right idea about parenting after reading Mommie Dearest
 
I am finding it hard this week with my mental health, we’ve done barely anything productive. Last week was ok, because they spent most of the time in the garden and I was happy they were out getting fresh air and moving and I felt less bad about the whole educating thing. But this week it’s been colder and they haven’t wanted to go out there as much. One of them only seems to want to play Roblox all day and refuses to get dressed (something I try and get them to do every day for routine). I wrote down some maths sums for them both to complete the other day but that was it. Eldest needs to work on reading and writing as they are slightly behind and I feel so guilty, I know I should be doing more. I don’t want to do hours of stuff a day, quite frankly I don’t have it in me, but I’ll feel even worse if they return to school and it turns out they have fallen even further behind, plus what will that do for their confidence?. I keep telling myself every child is in the same boat so shouldn’t stress about ‘home educating’ but other parents have been sending the teacher pictures of things they’ve done and giving out point to the kids and I’ve yet to send anything. Eldest dislikes literacy at the best of times and duck if I know the difference between a verb and a noun off the top of my head.

Just feeling a bit in over my head, totally unequipped and like im failing my kids. The school suggests 2 hours of ‘home learning’a day, they’ve provided materials to work with and a theme each week for the next few weeks, and I am barely managing 2 hours a week. Last week we did family trees as one of the suggested tasks and I had no idea what I was doing or how to ‘teach’ it to them. It was a mess and they got nothing out of it. Tomorrow (or today) I’m going to trawl twinkl for some fun looking work sheets and pray my dusty old printer still works.

This parenting malarkey is one never ending stream of pressure and guilt.
 
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