This year, over and over, I’ve heard friends say ‘I just want to get through’ 2020.They talk about a ‘lost year’, a ‘lonely year’, a 'terrible year.’ The pandemic and our unsettled politics seem to have an amplifying effect on other troubles large and small, so a broken plate or a broken bone can become yet another proof that this is a uniquely awful time. For many of us adults this is indeed a year of extraordinary uncertainly and sadness. There is no denying this. Our children feel all this too. They are our emotional mirrors absorbing our frustrations and fears and reflecting them back to us. 
A year is a quarter of 4-year-old’s life. Younger children might not even be able to remember a “before”. And for the children who can remember, many are experiencing deep sadness especially around the separation from friends, teachers and family. We worry about the consequences of so much isolation. While my business at Tinybop to make content for screens, we worry about the effect of so much time in front of them.. None of us designed for this.
From the early days of the pandemic when schools began shutting down, children reached out to us for answers. A few even managed to find our company phone number and dial in. Many had a simple question: “What’s going on?” I always tried to start with the facts and talk about how we were feeling, then I would talk about empathy: “We’re staying home because we care about our neighbors.” I say, "There’s a lot we don’t know and we don’t know if this is the right way to solve this problem, but everyone is working on it. We’ll figure it out. Eventually everything will open up again." Kids always seem to get this.
While it is often our instinct to hide our worries from children. I think we do best by them by bringing them into the conversation and talking about the things that matter. I suspect these next couple of months will be especially difficult. Limbo is amorphous. The vaccine seems so close and yet for most of us it will be out of reach for some time. Again, the way through is honest dialog.