There is no right way to parent during a pandemic, and everyone is doing their best.

On this week’s episode, we hear from parents in the thick of raising children during the coronavirus pandemic. We got a lot of questions from listeners, so we gathered them and enlisted two Wise Ones to help us work through them. Host Tonya Mosley is joined by Nancy Redd, author of several women’s health books and “Bedtime Bonnet.” And she’s the mother of two children — August, who is 9 years old, and Little Nancy who is 6. New York Times opinion writer and prolific tweeter Wajahat Ali is our second Wise One. Ali is a father of three little ones – 4-year-old Nusayba, 6-year-old Ibrahim and 8-month-old Khadija.

Redd had home-schooled her children before the pandemic, so this quarantine has been a return to their previous routine. As of this January, Ali’s 4-year-old daughter Nusayba was declared cancer-free after being diagnosed in 2019 with stage four cancer and receiving a liver transplant. And the two of them have figured out a way to not lose their minds while being a parent, a full-time writer and a healthy human during a pandemic. Mosley and the Wise Ones began the conversation with a check-in and stressed that the key is to not be too hard on yourself.

Wajahat Ali: It is a struggle for working parents. At first, people were saying, “Oh, isn’t it fantastic?” And now it’s like, “Yo, we are drowning.”

Nancy Redd: For individuals who are used to the work-life balance, where your child was away from you; you were away from home and you all come home together … To be honest with you, I have no idea how you can make this transition so swiftly and quickly. Of course, there is going to be some growing pains.

Both parents admit to the humbling lessons quarantine has taught them, such as valuing being in together as a family. But Redd and Ali say their experiences, although unique to their family and environment, are not that different from our listeners who wrote in with questions.

Question:

“Dear Truth be Told, my name is Giselle and I live in the Inland Empire in California. I have a 5 year old who just started kindergarten and an almost 3 year old. How do we address the question of “how long will this last?” Our 5 year old only experienced less than a school year [before COVID] and with school starting back up again, she’s confused why she won’t have a “first day of school” and asked when she will be able to do that again.”

Wajahat Ali: Yeah, my son also had a year of school before coronavirus and he had his routine. But what we told him and we told Nusaybah is: We’re in a global pandemic, there’s something called a virus. People are sick. People are dying. And so for our health right now, we have to stay away from some folks. We have to social distance so we can see our friends on Zoom and we might have to do something called distance learning on the internet. But, you know, this will eventually pass. It might take some time. It might be a year.” And so me and my wife, we have not coddled them when it comes to the reality of the pandemic.

Nancy Redd: Well, I don’t like to be wrong, so when I’m asked a question that I don’t have an answer to, I am never afraid to say, “I don’t know” because it makes them believe me more when I say “I know.” So what I like to do, especially with my littlest one, is to diffuse the situation and their anxiety. But whatever the question is, if it’s like, “How long would this last?” To afford a medium of autonomy in the relationship, I usually throw it back to them — “I don’t know. How long do you think? What do you think needs to happen before we can all get back to the way things were? What can we do to move things forward?” Keeping their little minds busy with active questions gives them less time to dwell on the p...