When the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the regional city I live in this week, my husband and I made the decision we had been putting off for weeks.
We decided to withdraw our two primary school-aged girls from school for the foreseeable future.
Along with this, we made some other decisions – to stop their extracurricular activities, including swimming lessons, and to cancel all playdates that they had organised for the upcoming Easter holidays, as well as two they had scheduled for this weekend.
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Unsurprisingly, none of these choices made on our end were well received on my children’s end – not school and especially not the playdates that they had been asking for so long to have.
There were tears – lots of them, desperate pleading for us to reconsider, the question “why?” was asked several times and the eventual evaluation, “it’s not fair,” was declared when they realised we weren’t going to backtrack.
And I get it, I totally understand. It is unfair. And to be quite honest I wanted to join in and cry with them.
Top Comments
They have parents and grand parents that love them ,warm beds and good food and a home.Pretty lucky really
We made the same decision.
My daughter just went up to the next level in swimming, made a new friend at gymnastics and we regularly have lots of playdates. I did feel terrible about taking away the things she enjoys, but we have both sets of grandparents to consider and can't ignore the statistics from overseas.
We've still gone outdoors and keeping busy with other things, and kids are resilient - they'll adapt - and there's not much else we can do. They are still so much more fortunate than so many other kids around the world, and that's something to be grateful for.