Reply to Anyone Feel Guilty for Isolating Their Kids due to COVID???

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Reply to "Anyone Feel Guilty for Isolating Their Kids due to COVID???"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically.  Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please.  If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low.  Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health.  Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context.  Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!).  I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.[/quote]

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.[/quote]

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue.  She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize).  The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities.  No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two?  Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.[/quote]

If each person individually optimized their personal risk profile then the pandemic would have overwhelmed hospitals. The total cost to our GDP would have exceeded the $16 trillion lost due to people saying, “well, I’m not high risk so I don’t have to wear a mask and can indoor dine.” We would have been overwhelmed by more virulent variants. More long haul cases would have crippled adults and children. Economists like her with no public health background have zero role in informing the public about how to deal with a systemic issue like a pandemic. She was trying to figure out whether her children could attend summer camp in Maine... I mean, come on. Talk about out of touch with how most people experienced the pandemic, not to mention the disproportionate effects on the homeless, incarcerated, and people of color.
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