The thing we call “parenting” is, to some extent, a long stretch of decision-making on behalf of another person. It begins with questions about breast-feeding and sleep, and progresses through more complex topics like discipline, schooling, and sex education. It can be unnerving to have such power. We want to get it right for our sweet, vulnerable children, or at least be comforted by the thought that other people are getting it wrong. People divide themselves into opposing camps: breast- versus bottle-feeders, gamers versus screen-free homes. Scuffles break out in Facebook groups.
To this, the coronavirus has added a new dilemma: Are you sending your kid back to school in September? It’s an impossible choice—so much so that schools themselves are having trouble making a call and sticking to it. For the past few weeks, as New York City schools rolled out hybrid learning plans, and the Mayor publicly battled with the teachers’ union, I agonized over the question of whether or not to send my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to day care. After a few gruelling, sometimes-magical months of family quarantine, her father and I were getting desperate. Our jobs are not compatible with running an in-home preschool. We prepared to enroll her. But, as the date approached, new information kept coming along that rattled my confidence. The school in Georgia. The camp in Texas. The headlines proclaiming that children under five are walking around with a high “viral load” in their noses. Was I sending us all off a cliff?
Seeking reassurance, I logged on to Facebook, where I found even more desperation in various mom groups. “Please tell me I’m not the only one torn on the decision,” someone had written in a group for Brooklyn moms. A torrent of anguish followed: “This entire ordeal has set us back immensely.” . . . “I feel like I am forced to choose between his health and his brain.” . . . “Subway is going to be a filthy fiasco.” . . . “The school has no clue how they are going to clean and with what products.” . . . “We work from home and it’s impossible to do remote learning with 2 kids, do homework, and work!” . . . “I have to lose my job for this[?]”
The women’s- and family-health startup Maven, which connects users with health-care providers like pediatricians and ob-gyns, has seen a three-hundred-per-cent spike in the use of its mental-health services since the pandemic began. Psychiatrists and coaches reported that while the causes were all over the map—unemployment, marital problems, existing depression or anxiety that had been made worse by lockdowns—one of the biggest stressors was child care. Maven commissioned a survey of a thousand parents and found that, as of August, sixty-three per cent of them were still undecided about whether or not to send their children back to school. The company’s founder and C.E.O., Kate Ryder, told me, “People are so stressed out that they’re not able to make decisions. Couples are struggling. Each partner might be on a different side of questions like, is it safe to ride the subway or not?”
To help them, the company partnered with an expert in the realm of parental decision-making: Emily Oster, a health economist at Brown University whom I profiled last year, and whose books, “Expecting Better” and “Cribsheet,” on pregnancy and child-rearing, respectively, have won her Dr. Spock status among a certain type of new parent—the type likely to take “metrics” into account in their daily decision-making. Oster has a knack for interpreting scientific data for a broad audience. Like Steven Levitt, the “Freakonomics” author, she applies an economist’s tools—and an economist’s cool-headed temperament—to unlikely and fraught topics such as pregnancy diets, potty training, and the day-care-versus-nanny question.
Naturally, she’s been in demand in the era of COVID-19. “It’s been all COVID all the time,” she told me last week from her home in Providence, where, like all working parents, she was taking calls while nominally supervising a five-year-old and a nine-year-old. She co-chaired Brown’s reopening task force and co-created a Web site, COVID-Explained, which provides an overview of medical and scientific knowledge about the virus. She also writes a parenting newsletter, ParentData, in which she has been attempting to bring fact-based reasoning to parents grappling with the latest coronavirus news. In general, she said, her readers’ mental state is “poor.” “I think the uncertainty is what’s really weighing on people,” she said. “The world is very confusing right now. No one feels good about any of their choices.”
Some of our confusion has to do with our expectations. “There’s a bunch of people like the President—and even people who are not so terrible—saying, ‘Kids don’t get it!,’ ” she explained. So we’re stunned when we read about instances in which kids do get COVID-19. Meanwhile, “The actual truth is nuanced. Kids tend to have very mild infections. They do not seem to get very sick in most cases. It’s not that they can’t get sick, but it’s rare. The piece that is less certain is the degree to which they transmit the virus if they get it. And I think our best data suggests that younger kids probably do transmit it less efficiently than older adults. Although not everyone would say that was totally settled.”
In her recent writings, Oster has critiqued the methodology of that viral-load-in-the-nose study and questioned its usefulness for school-opening decisions. Instead, she gives more credence to a large South Korean study, which found that young children transmit the virus within households at very low rates. When the American Academy of Pediatrics and Children’s Hospital Association issued a report saying that almost a hundred thousand kids had tested positive for the virus in the last two weeks of July, she told me, “People were like, ‘Oh, my God. This is such terrible news. I thought that kids didn’t get it!’ It’s interesting. I talked to a pediatrician, a guy who’s a specialist in pediatric infectious disease, and he was, like, ‘I read that headline as reassuring. Look at how many kids got it, and not that many of them were hospitalized!’ ” In her newsletter, she wrote, “Conclusion: please do not panic every time there is a scary headline. Breathe, read the context, and think about what we learn.”
Back in the spring, Oster was fielding a lot of e-mails from readers begging for help with the daily conundrums that come up during the pandemic: Is it safe for us to get a babysitter? To go to the grocery store when we have a newborn at home? To have a playdate with the neighbor’s kids? And the most common: Is it safe for us to visit the grandparents? She recalled, “People would send these incredibly specific e-mails, like, ‘I live in Washington, and my parents live in this part of Oregon, and we’d have to drive X hours to see them and stop at three restaurants. . . .’ ” The answer was usually, “It depends.” Each family has a different set of options, preferences, and health risks. She couldn’t write back to everyone, so she created a five-step decision-making system—a COVID-19-specific version of cost-benefit analysis, that goes like this:
The Link LonkAugust 26, 2020 at 05:02PM
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/should-you-send-your-child-back-to-school-during-the-pandemic
Should You Send Your Child Back to School During the Pandemic? - The New Yorker
https://news.google.com/search?q=Send&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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