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My Daughter’s Math Homework Has Been Our Pandemic Lifeline

It turns out schoolwork is the pandemic parenting hack you never expected

Jessica Valenti
GEN
Published in
3 min readJan 27, 2021

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Photo: Kira Hofmann/picture alliance via Getty Images

There’s nothing quite like being a pandemic parent in the winter. Gone are the outdoor playdates and park time; being stuck in the apartment these past few cold months has taken on a whole new level of isolation. Yet one thing has made the dreary pandemic winter more bearable: doing math homework with my 10-year-old daughter.

Hear me out.

When it comes to parenting during Covid-19, there’s no shortage of woes to choose from. Whether it’s going without childcare, trying to navigate remote learning, or experiencing the sadness of watching your kids struggle with loneliness, the virus has made the already difficult task of caring for another human exponentially more difficult.

For me, though, the hardest thing about trying to help my daughter through this past year has been the uncertainty — for the first time ever, we can’t give Layla a straight answer. We can’t tell her how long this will go on for; we don’t know when she’ll be able to have an indoor playdate again or when she’ll be able to go to school without a mask in a classroom that isn’t a dance studio with all the windows open. It’s a big change for young…

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Published in GEN

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Jessica Valenti
Jessica Valenti

Written by Jessica Valenti

Feminist author & columnist. Native NYer, pasta enthusiast. I write about abortion every day at abortioneveryday.com