The social emotional aspect plays a bigger factor in it. My daughter, she’s pretty advanced in her schooling. So there’s state testing three times a year, she’s always been high or above average on all of her stuff. So I’m not really concerned about her. But my son, he started kindergarten. Boys in general, for writing and reading, it’s more difficult for them to pick up on even in the grade that I teach, fifth grade. You still see it as a struggle for most boys. And so that’s my concern. He’s learning to read and he’s learning to write and he’s missing that. He missed three months of kindergarten where those skills were really starting to be developed and honed . Even at home, being a teacher myself, and trying to get him to sit down and write with me, it’s like ripping teeth out. It’s like, come on, buddy, just two words. Can you give me two words?
He’s pretty good in math. When we were doing stuff virtually in the spring, he’s like, this is for babies. This is so boring. But, you know, we worked with him as parents. My husband’s an engineer so math is super important to him. You can imagine my kids knowing how to add and subtract and multiply is definitely one of the top things my husband wants them to be able to do. We play around in a car, “Hey, what’s five plus seven,” and he’ll give us the answer. Every night we read to our kids or have them read to us. But the writing part is more worrisome for me, for him anyway, in terms of social, emotional.
For my daughter, we have more little girls that we know just because she’s been in school longer. So the ones that I have close relationships with, from working with them or from being in daycare, we’ll have little playdates with them because I know that they’re just as cautious as I am about the health of their kids. So for her, we’ve been able to have a couple of those playdates where she can get together with her friends, whereas we don’t know as many little boys in our neighborhood or in our area where I can be like, oh, hey, you know, do you want to have a playdate with Nathan and hang out? And so for me, that kind of breaks my heart because I know he needs that. But we don’t have access to those kids.
Whereas in the spring when you were doing extra help running the school or you’re going to field day or you’re going to their after school picnic things where you see other parents and you see other kids and you can have those discussions like, oh, hey, we should play or hey, we should do this. We didn’t get to do that because of Covid. That was disappointing. At least they have each other to play with. I’m thankful for that, but I do think that social emotional interaction is important.
Just seeing him interact now with baseball, has been wonderful. It just started a couple of weeks ago. He’s so excited. He’s like, I met some friends. Can we hang out and can we play with them? I’m so excited that I get to talk to this boy and this one’s a really good friend, too. Just to see him light up again about interacting with other kids just sets your heart out to know that this is really important. And to have that loss again for many months could be detrimental.
