Parents able to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic will experience an interesting new wrinkle this week: children.
These smaller roommates, because of school closures in a growing number of cities and states across the country, will be underfoot for the foreseeable future. They'll be engaged at least part of the time with some form of e-learning, but the odds of that keeping them at bay throughout the regular adult-human workday are slim to none.
Additionally, the coronavirus has caused everything to be canceled There are no after-school activities, school sports, plays, concerts, recitals, amusement parks or playdates.
Now don't get me wrong, I like children. I even helped make some. But anyone who has tried to work from home with kids around will tell you it's tricky, largely because they clamor for unnecessary things such as attention and food and nurturing while you just want to be left alone to carry out your drab, wretched existence.
To help better the lives of all working parents in the coming weeks, I've researched productive ways to keep children entertained. There's ample new-age blah-blah out there about finding brain-stimulating projects for them to work on, but we all know those activities lead to millions of annoying questions and various forms of hot-glue-gun injuries.
So I took a look back _ way back _ and gained valuable perspective from our forebears. I knew I was onto something when I read the following sentence: "Children in the Middle Ages were seen as useless."
"Go on ..." I thought.
Turns out "useless" might be too strong a term. Children in an agrarian society were viewed with pragmatism, handy helpers who could do farm work and household chores. Move on to early American settlements and the character-building exploitation of youth continued.
According to a summary of "the role of children on an 18th-century Virginia farm" by the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation: "Children began working on the farm at a very young age. They were given simple tasks such as sweeping, washing dishes, feeding chickens and other poultry, collecting eggs, picking and stringing vegetables for drying, topping the tobacco (removing the flowers to encourage the leaves to grow bigger), and picking tobacco worms off of plants."
Fantastic. I have no idea why it took me so long to realize I could have my children picking tobacco worms off plants instead of playing video games.
Fast forward to the industrial revolution and the ideas for keeping kids busy really start to expand.
A 2017 article in the Bureau of Labor Statistics publication Monthly Labor Review _ I read it mainly for the erotic consumer price index charts _ explained that in 1575, "England provided for the use of public money to employ children in order to "accustom them to labor" and "afford a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers."
As the coronavirus pandemic holds up American life, the last thing we want is for our idle children to become vagabonds and/or paupers.
The article continued: "The growth of manufacturing, however, provided the greatest opportunity for society to avoid the perceived problem of the idle child. ... For example, one industrialist in 1790 proposed building textile factories around London to employ children to 'prevent the habitual idleness and degeneracy' that were destroying the community. With the advances in machinery, not only could society avoid the issue of unproductive children, but also the children themselves could easily create productive output with only their rudimentary skills."
My children absolutely have rudimentary skills, and I would love to prevent them from degeneracy!
So the answer to keeping our children occupied during this pandemic is simple: Put them to work.
This will require some initial effort on the part of parents, given that few in the Chicago area live on a farm or have easy access to a textile mill.
But believe me, it's doable. I spent the weekend preparing a coal mine in the backyard, and already my kids are busy as bees, working long, inflexible hours carrying grease buckets down into the mine while being careful not to get maimed by coal cars.
A few other fun ways to immerse your children in a world of hard labor _ "Who wants to play Pauper Apprentices?!?" _ are as follows:
1) Declare your backyard a "working farm" and command the kids to take up the yoke and plow furrows in the field, and not to come back inside until the job is done. (You can reward them with a crust of bread.) If your yard is too small, send them to a nearby park. Or you can order livestock on Amazon, though the shipping is taking a bit longer than usual, particularly for larger items like cows.
2) Set up a bowling alley in the basement and have the kids work as pin boys or, in the interest of gender equity, pin girls. Just make sure the alley is smoke-filled and loud and the pin boys or girls posted along the back wall are regularly struck in the head by flying pins and yelled at while receiving a wage of $1 per day.
3) Unleash the fun of being a chimney sweep! Because they're small and can fit in weird places, children have always been great for cleaning things such as chimneys, and nothing says fun quite like stuffing your bored child up a soot-covered chute with a brush and a mission.
Really, the possibilities are endless. Together, I'm sure we can work through this difficult time and ensure that the lives of our children are as miserable as our own.
It's just good parenting.
