Across the globe, grandparents and grandchildren who are separated due to the COVID-19 pandemic are using the Caribu app to connect with their loved ones. Caribu offers many meaningful and exciting ways to enhance family video-calls: online books, games, puzzles, and coloring pages that you can share together in a virtual playdate.
Grandparents Day is on Sunday, and it’s a wonderful opportunity to connect and celebrate with family and friends. Grandparents and grandchildren (and grandfriends!) share special relationships: Kids bring fresh energy and wonder to the world, and can fill conversations with joy and smiles. Grandparents bring a loving warmth that allows kids to relax and have fun with stories, games, recipes, and routines that differ from the ones they are used to with their parents. Even when you are not able to see grandchildren in person, connecting online with Caribu is an opportunity to meet virtually face-to-face, hear each other’s voices, and share the activities you enjoy the most together.
Are you a virtual grandparent? With COVID-19 safety precautions pushing communications online, it’s important to connect with family and friends using technology to avoid feelings of isolation and sadness. Fortunately, Caribu has helped bridge the gap for many families. Caribu provides a meaningful tool for grandparents to connect with their grandchildren at a safe social distance. With each Caribu video-call, grandparents and grandchildren can pick books to read, pages to color, and games to play in an interactive playdate. It’s a magical way to stay in touch and share in the everyday lives of family near and far.
Creating space and time for both our parenting and professional roles has always been the big challenge for working parents. But nothing could have prepared us for the stress of these roles colliding under quarantine conditions. Now we aren’t just parents who work, we are balancing multiple full-time roles—parent, employee, educator. Even if you’re fortunate enough to be able to work from home right now, the stakes have never felt higher. We aren’t just employees doing a job, we’re also shouldering the responsibility of managing entirely new ways of working and communicating with colleagues—all under the shadow of intense fear of job loss.
Even if you’re an expert who has written 13 bestsellers on parenthood, your adult sons and daughters will assume you know nothing about childrearing. Your advice and opinions will not be welcome, unless directly solicited. Tread lightly.
To be graceful is to move smoothly, both physically and emotionally, as well as to be gentle and kind. Parenting gracefully through this quarantine is no small feat, but I believe there are a couple of simple steps parents can take with their elementary-age kiddos.
When schools and day cares shut down in March, no one thought it would last more than a few months. But in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic is nowhere near under control. That makes in-person schooling an iffy proposition in many parts of the country. Even if your school plans to have students on campus for at least part of the school year, it’s wise to prepare for repeated shutdowns, closures, or quarantines when children, teachers, and staff test positive for COVID-19. Remote learning is here to stay, so we spoke to several ed tech experts about identifying possible obstacles and aiming for reasonable goals.
No matter what shape school takes for your child this fall — remote, in-person, some combination thereof — there’s no question this year is going to be different. The usual day-to-day rhythms are gone. The stakes are high. Parents and teachers are on edge. But now, more than ever, we are all in this together. And parents and caregivers certainly want to help support the educators who are risking quite a lot to guide their children through these unprecedented times.
Your kids are hearing about coronavirus (COVID-19). You want to make sure they get reliable information — and you want them to hear it from you. Here’s how to talk about it.
Children are capable of understanding science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) concepts when they are less than a year old but these skills must be developed intentionally.