Why is it so much harder now?

I have talked at length to parents, grandparents and even great grandparents about this. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just being a whiney little brat. They all agree, parenting now is just so much harder.

The most obvious example is my oldest daughters education. It started in Kindergarten when a category 5 hurricane wrecked our town. Our schools were shelters for about 6 weeks. Then two weeks to clean them up and prep for school to begin. In total, my doe-eyed princess missed about eight weeks of education in her first year. Ok, not really anyone’s fault. Nobody in the path of that storm expected it to grow so big, so strong, so fast.

The next year, her first grade year, We took a family trip to Disney World the last week of February thru the first week of March. When we returned home Covid-19 had shut the world down. My daughter stayed home for the next six months. We attempted the “virtual learning” her public school provided but it was an absolute train wreck. One of her teachers was woefully unprepared for that kind of learning, the other was woefully “over it” and wouldn’t even speak to the students.

Now here we are about 1/3 of the way through her second grade year. While I am so thankful we have not been shut down yet, the regulations the school has to function under are suffocating the classrooms. Zero contact with teachers despite having 947563345 apps the school requires for us to access daily. And don’t get me started on the email blasts they send out in an effort to seem accessible and proactive. I would have to carve out, at minimum, an hour of my life every day to read the volumes being sent out. Thankfully, they have ZERO to do with my child or her grade so ya know, totally worth it. (epic eye roll here).

I found myself venting to my mother on one of the many days we chat in the morning, correction… every day we chat in the morning. She said, “well baby, I just don’t understand why you need all of that. When you were in school, we just dropped you off with a lunch and you came home a little bit smarter. In the summer we would rehydrate you, get a little sunshine then send you back for more.Why do they need all this stuff?”

Mom, if only I had an answer for you.

If y’all redirected 1/4 of your time from email blasts and “special presentations” and returned to reading, writing and arithmetic (do NOT say core… I will throw my flip flop at you), our MAPS test and all of the other acronym test scores would go through the roof. You’d get all the freaking funding you need and you could cease with the dang scholastic book order, class t-shirt orders, classroom snack requests, and every other way you drain my bank account.

I look forward to my generation, and the one right behind me, finally saying ENOUGH. No more computers, no more social media, no more apps or notifications or messages or zooms. Just give my child a book to read and a piece of paper to write on.

If wishing made it so.