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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I live in the Midwest.  I do feel sorry for DC area kids, they have had a terrible time.  My kids were back in school in-person August 2020, we started hanging out with friends, eating in restaurants, etc. May 2020.  Their lives have been pretty much normal for over a year (except wearing masks but they adapted fine to that).

The people arguing that that COVID decisions are a personal choice are right, sort of, but if your entire community has chosen to lock down, who would your kids hang out with even if you wanted to be more open?  When I tell my DC friends the pandemic basically ended for my area a year ago, they act like I have 2 heads.  Ang guess what, our numbers are on par to slightly better than DC area.  What was it all for?

In hindsight, I do feel bad for you![/quote]

Well put. Yes, some of the isolation was a personal choice, and I was one who definitely erred on the side of caution. Why? It was a combination of fear and genuine concern about the well-being of the community. I thought that if we all hunkered down and did our part to minimize spread, we would get through this more quickly. In hindsight, I was too cautious and my kids suffered for it. I thought I was teaching them about being good citizens, but it no longer seems worth it when return to normalcy seems years away. [/quote]

same. I live with some heavy guilt that I kept my kid home - he started to go downhill right after I made that decision.

the only bright spot is that the experience taught me a lot about being overprotective and forced me to look more objectively at what my kid needs.[/quote]

OP again.  I also have guilt about my kids being home last year when their school was fully virtual.  Other families did a pod (which our school discouraged) and we did not - first because we weren't comfortable with the safety of that last August and second because were were holding out waiting for their school to reopen, which we expected to happen much sooner than late Spring.  I wish there had been a structural option for us to send our kids back into school, but since there wasn't, maybe we should have made the choice to do a pod.  We learned that our kids really needed the peer social interaction and started making that happen regularly in late winter and it made a huge difference.  We sent them to camp this summer and that made a huge difference.

So, in hindsight I regret that one personal decision (pod) although my spouse remains firm that was the right decision at the time.  From late winter, we have righted the ship and are doing everything we can to get our kids' social needs met, but we as one family don't control the overall structure of the pandemic.  I am really happy the direction has come out that kids need to be in school in person full-time this fall.  That's a huge structural change that's going to make a big difference for kids and families.  But it feels like this is never going to end unless people get vaccinated because without herd immunity there will be more and more variants and we could be dealing with this for so many precious years of childhood. It makes me long for the simplicity of my childhood and 2 years ago where we didn't have to constantly remind Larla to put her mask back on/over her nose or fight with Larlo about wearing a mask in the first place.

I would like to see more structural changes like vaccine mandates that shift some of the burden of keeping kids safe off of the backs of parents and teachers and onto the society as a whole.[/quote]

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