If you are a parent yourself, you would know that they mean the world to you. The kind of love that allows you to do everything in your power to protect them their entire life. The pandemic, for parents, must have been stressful to keep their children safe from all threats. However, keeping your children at home 24/7 could be affecting your children's mental & physical health. Here's why. 

      
1. Dormant body.

Your children need to exercise, play & run to strengthen their muscles, increase their body immune system & stay healthy. Unfortunately, they are forced to stay inside and most probably watch TV, playing games on laptop or phones most of the time and that could be due to busy parents working from home or doing house chores. 

With the current extended MCO, we would have no idea how long we are going to continue this new lifestyle. We would suggest spending some time working out some light activities during the weekend to get both parents and children moving for a healthier lifestyle. 

2. Issues of e-classes. 

Let's be real here, not every teacher is capable of teaching online. There are so many problems attending an online class: there could be a lack of digital sources, bad internet connections or too many students at the same time. 

In reality, there is a possibility that you don't have enough devices for all your family members at home, and you would have to sacrifice some other member's schedule to match with everyone's. Even if you do have enough devices for everyone, then the issues could be managing your work & your children online classes at the same time, which is almost quite impossible for the most working environment.  

3. Social skills.

Do you remember the times where we could go to school and play around with our classmates? All these activities that seemed so normal are the new taboo today, with the spiking case numbers every day. Staying home is the new normal for our children and that could impact their social skills in a bad way. The lack of person-to-person interaction for a long time could be difficult for some children, and we worry that it would impact their social skills over time, or even worse, their mental health especially when they grow up in the future.

What can we, the parents do?

Living in this pandemic era, we will need to make sure our children understand the issues of Covid19 & educate them the preventative methods from being infected. In hope that one day, when everything gets better and all the children are able to resume their normal lives, we can rest assured our children are capable of staying safe themselves, by maintaining social distance, always wearing their mask, washing & sanitizing their hands regularly.