Glancing up from Zoom I see my three children gallivanting in the garden, making up games to combat the boredom, and think their childhood looks much like mine. Except for the eerie quiet. In lockdown, England is without traffic, without church bells and overhung by a sense of impending doom.
My youngest son is only 10. How much should I tell him about this crisis? Should I stop him watching the news, or give him a crash course in the history of the Depression? Should I try to bolster his job prospects in an uncertain world by enrolling him in a coding course or prepare him for dystopia by teaching him to trap a rabbit? Or is lockdown a chance to give him back his childhood?
Parents find this new world hard to navigate. Only a few weeks ago we were learning to wash our hands for 20 seconds, singing “Happy Birthday”, while inventing increasingly ridiculous names for the birthday recipient to ram the message home. Now the schools have closed and thousands have died. The script is still being written with no end in sight. A friend’s eight-year old keeps asking if everyone is going to die.