How Is Lockdown Shaping Children’s Understanding Of Relationships?

Lockdown means that children may be seeing the relationship of their parents under a microscope and, like many things looked at very closely, it might not be a pretty sight!

The last year has had a huge impact on relationships with uncertainty, fear, frustrations, restrictions and families trapped in a small space with their freedoms curtailed. Real life relationships will be playing out every day, in close up, in every children’s home.

In the past a child would normally see one or both parents going off to work and coming back with limited time to talk. The roles of the parents were clearer and the boundaries between work and home were normally physical. Children now see their parents trapped together in the same space trying to be parents, teachers, employees, partners all in the same space and the same time.

For children there has been little escape for them to go to school or mix with friends, and almost inevitably, because of the pressure and uncertainty more arguments and disagreements than there used to be. They are having to cope with a very different world where there is more conflict and uncertainty than they were used to. With less opportunity to engage with friends and teachers their model of relationships will have become limited to that of their parents

Good parents and lucky parents will have been able to invest their time in building their relationship with their partner and their children. They will have been able to segment their different roles of work, home, teacher, partner, parent. They will have talked, shared and built their connection with their partner and children. This will have given their children more insight into the work their parents did as well as more understanding of the whole person.

Parents whose relationship had not been as good as it could have been will have suffered, faced with the different pressures and uncertainties. They may have allowed the resentments to grow and the disagreements to be unresolved and either swept under the, now very lumpy carpet, or to explode into arguments.

This has been a great opportunity for children to understand their parents better and to learn that good relationships have their ups and downs. They will have experienced how their parents deal with stress, frustration and disagreements and that they can either pull together as a team or get into a downward spiral of blame and deepen the cracks in a relationship.

The younger the children are, the more what they have experienced in the last year will become their model for their future relationships. Children need to be taught, by example, what a great relationship is like. They also need to understand that life changes and that falling in love is easy but staying in love requires hard work.

The six key elements of a relationship that children can learn from their parents are:

Communication – expressing your feelings to each other and feeling listened to and understood

Connection – having time each day where you are there for each other and fully present

Commitment – both being clear about what you want from life and from the relationship and working to achieve this

Fun – spending time doing things together, sharing laughs and good times

Growth – the you, me and ‘us’ all growing and being fulfilled

Trust – doing what we say we are going to do, being there for each other and being open and honest

Couples should regularly be talking about their relationship, calibrating it and agreeing where improvements are needed. Brave parents can also talk to their children about their relationships

If parents can show their children that they are doing this in the same way that tests at school chart their own progress, this will demonstrate a great model for their future relationships.