As a parent living in 2020, there’s a good chance that few moments have gone by in the past month when your mind hasn’t been scrambling to decide what to do about school this fall.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is “strongly urging” all students to return to school as usual this fall. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention originally recommended the opposite, saying that online learning was the safest option. They’ve since updated their recommendations to align with that of the AAP and the White House.
To send or not to send, that is the question. And it’s one that Dr. Hope Seidel, a pediatrician in Cary, North Carolina, has gotten asked the most in the last several weeks.
With so many parents facing this “painful” struggle, Seidel, who is also a parenting coach, wanted to share her advice, with the hope that it would bring comfort to parents who are understandably fearful about the decision at hand.
In a now-viral Facebook Live video, Seidel says that while the question has been the same across the board, the circumstances are not.
“Some of you have kids with asthma. Some of you work full time and some of you stay home and are thinking about homeschooling. Some of you have kids with learning disabilities and some of our patients have food insecurities where they need to be able to go to school to be able to get a full belly,” she said.
“All of you don’t have anything in common when you call and ask me the question about school,” Seidel said in the video, except, she said, “fear of making the wrong decision.”
So when it comes to standing in the gap and addressing this fear that so many parents are carrying, Seidel’s advice is simple: “The decision that you make about school is the right decision.”
for those of you who want to know how i feel about school this year.
#trustyourself #nowrongdecision #fearisnotreal
