Growing Up COVID: A Family Lesson in Empathy

Rebecca Braun, Professor of Modern Languages & Creative Futures; Co-Director of ISF

When I was promoted three years ago, my then 11 year-old daughter greeted the news with a mixture of pride and surprise: ‘That’s kind of cool. You don’t usually think of a professor as a woman.’ I was both touched and troubled by her reaction. Having built a career whilst also building a family, I have always sensed that what I do is subject to the scrutiny of my three daughters, now aged 14, 10 and 7. Travelling for work, sometimes coming back late, and knowing my children much prefer it when I stay put, I have felt the weight of their gaze as they look at me and draw conclusions about who they might like to become and what they might have to do to get there.

However, if family life before Covid-19 was at least a little bit about communicating pathways for success to girls who are not naturally inclined to believe in themselves, family life with Covid-19 has been much more about exploring each other’s failures. Where previously the professional woman happened outside the home, with just occasional reports on her work shared alongside the much more interesting stories of school and friends over dinner, now all of our lives are happening all of the time, all on top of one another. My children have had to endure their parents becoming their teachers, only for the parents to run off in the middle of a lesson to take a conference call. Tempers have frayed all round. What have we learned?

Professional setbacks come with the job, but they come nothing like as thick and fast as the setbacks a 7-year-old endures trying to learn to tell the time, a 10-year-old suffers doing gymnastics, or a 14-year-old feels having to decipher Macbeth on her own. To a degree, at least, we choose our job; the children ordinarily have no say in what or how they are taught and assessed. At the end of one day, a daughter quietly confided in me that she was worried about growing up because she didn’t think she was clever enough.

It wasn’t exactly a planned response, but I gave her an answer of sorts the next afternoon by bursting into tears just as everyone arrived in the kitchen for lunch. In fact, I sobbed so bitterly and was so unable to talk that everyone assumed there had been a death in the family. All that had really happened was that someone in my day job had said I wasn’t very good at something. The kids, who have willingly opened up to me about their frustrations with trigonometry, spelling, and tying their shoelaces, tactfully slunk away.

I spent some days after this incident pondering just how much of my job my kids can comprehend, and what changes for them if they see me not managing things very well. Eventually I figured I should just ask them. We got to the nub of the matter pretty quickly.

“How often do you think things go wrong for you?”

“Every hour”, “Every day.”

“But I mean something you’ve really tried hard it. If you really try hard at something, does it still go wrong?”

“Ok, no, usually if I really try it works out.”

“And do you think adults get things wrong when they try hard?”

“Yeah, but they don’t like to admit it. Because they think people won’t respect them. Adults always want to be right.”

Is it helpful, then, for people in positions of authority to share their failings?

The girls were unanimous: yes, parents and teachers really should wise up to not knowing everything.

“And what about in my job? Should I share my failings with my work colleagues? Might it be helpful for all of us at work if we talked more openly about these things?”

“Hell no, because there will always be those few people who are jealous and want to see you do badly! No, you definitely shouldn’t do that, Mum!”

Whatever I might have thought I was modelling to my daughters before, they have internalised far more of the societal norms that are shaping their future than I can counter by trying to model a different way of doing things now.

Nevertheless, just right now, life in lockdown has become a delicious sort of complicity. For this short period of time, it doesn’t really matter if we can’t spell words properly, the research project isn’t coming together, or we can’t get out of bed before midday. While we wait for our past lives to catch up with us and quite probably demand different things of us again in the future, we can afford to take a sideways glance at the hopes and fears that have shaped our lives up until now.

The other day, the 7-year-old looked curiously at a research paper I had been scribbling all over.

“I’m trying to decide whether it should be published or not,” I explained. “I need to get it right, because it will matter a lot to the person who has written this. Unfortunately, it’s not looking very good.”

“Hmm,” she said, “I get that. Because yesterday you weren’t very good.”