COVID-19: Tips for Parenting
Tips for engaging kids of different ages with routines altered by COVID-19.
Tips on how healthcare workers can prepare their children for how COVID-19 may affect their lives.
Tips to share COVID-19 information with children - guide, video, comic.
Wash children’s faces and hands often. Clean surfaces and objects that young children touch.
Whenever possible, teach children to avoid putting things in their mouths.
Encourage children to play outside and maintain a 6ft/2m distance from people living in other houses. Bring your own balls, toys, surface and sports equipment and clean them after each use. Wash children’s hands after playtime.
COVID-19 lasts longest on metals and plastics and for shorter periods on porous surfaces like paper or clothing. COVID-19 is inactivated by washing with dilute bleach solutions or soap and water, by heat and by UV rays in sunlight.
Avoid playgrounds because children frequently touch their mouths and distribute mucous onto playground surfaces which are then often touched by other children.
Consider ideas for answering COVID-19 questions from children aged 0-3 years old.
Teach your kids how and when to wash their hands and supervise the washing. The 20 second washing takes about the same amount of time as singing “Happy Birthday” or saying the alphabet. A musical video may help.
Add fun to activities that prevent COVID-19
Make your own (~20 second) song for handwashing with actions. Give children points and praise for regular handwashing.
Create a contest to see who touches their face the least over an hour or even 5 minutes.
Anxiety or fear in young children may present as changes in behaviour. Your child’s anxiety may appear as: thumb sucking, bedwetting, clinging to parents, sleep disturbances, tantrums, agitation, loss of appetite, complaining of headache or stomach ache, fear of the dark, regression in behavior, and withdrawal.
The Canadian Pediatrics Society has created helpful tools.
Additional tools include:
Creating routines.
Limit screen & social media time. Increased social media time can worsen anxiety.
Have calm conversations to help ease children’s fears.
Identify a safe space in your home where children can retreat to when stressed e.g. a home-made fort.
Foster relationships with all parents by honouring co-parenting agreements throughout COVID-19. Parenting exchanges are best done in open areas. Adults must remain 6ft/2m apart. Children’s clothing, toys, and other personal belongings should be washed after each exchange. If one co-parent or someone in their house must self isolate, notify the other parent right away and make a plan for the children’s safety. It may temporarily alter the parenting schedule. After self-isolation, provide make-up time for the parent who missed out.
It is safe and beneficial to breastfeed even if the mother is infected with COVID-19. Breastfeeding enhances the infant’s immunity.
If breastfeeding mothers are sick with COVID-19 but well enough to breastfeed, wear a mask when near the infant (including during feeding), wash hands before and after contact with the infant and clean/disinfect contaminated surfaces.
If a mother is too ill to feed, she should be encouraged to express milk and give it to the child via a clean cup and/or spoon. Wash hands before and after contact with the infant and clean/disinfect contaminated surfaces.
Created by: Tori Spangehl BKin, BSN, (MD Candidate 2021); Paige Dean BSc, (MD Candidate 2021); Angeli Rawat MPH PhD (Global Public Health Consultant); Maureen Mayhew MD MPH AAC (Clinical Professor) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada