COVID's Impact on My Parents

I know that Covid effected everyone, and the impact it had on different people and their lives really varied. I decided to interview my parents on their views about Covid, having kids in college during a pandemic, and the impacts Covid has had on theirs lives and jobs.

First, I interviewed my mom. My mom's overarching view of the pandemic is that everyone has gone crazy. She believes that people need to be cautious by wearing a mask, avoiding gatherings, and social distancing, but she struggles to understand how people just pause their lives for this pandemic. She would classify her friends in one of two categories: super strict or carefully living life. She says that none of her friends are being careless, but she believes some of them who have completely changed their lives around the pandemic are taking things too far. She says that one of our neighbors who she used to go on walks with won't even leave her house. Most of her friends though have the same views as her. They want to continue living their lives, so they have worked in daily precautions to keep themselves and everyone around them safe. They want their kids to be back in school and back into their activities. This leads me into my mom's view of having kids in college during a pandemic. She believes that kids are being shortchanged, and that education in-person is much more effective than when it is online. Having a child who had an IEP and struggles learning has helped her to see how these kids struggle with online learning the most, and she does not like how it is setting these kids behind. Covid has not had much of an impact on my mom's life because she already worked from home. None of the companies she does work for went out of business, so her workload went unimpacted. She says that the biggest impact on her life was socially. My mom is like me and is extremely social and loves to be involved in things. Covid has stopped her from being able to do things such as meet with her church group, volunteer at school and even go out to lunch or coffee with her friends.

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Next, I interviewed my dad. His overarching view of Covid is that it is very overblown. He, like my mom, wishes that people looked at the science behind things instead of only listening to the media because many things people are putting out there have been proven wrong. When I asked him about having kids in college during a pandemic, he told me that he wasn't too worried. He thinks that people have made it out to be a huge challenge, and it is not as dangerous as people have made it seem. He feels as if his kids are safe and that universities are taking good precautions to keep everyone healthy. The pandemic affected his job pretty significantly at first. During the lockdown, he was one of the few people who still went to work at the office. He said to me "I was the person who made sure the office kept going." He had to step up into extra roles to keep everyone safe and complete tasks of those who were no longer there. He says that his company was no substantially effected. They are having a lot less travel and more employee issues (people asking for extra time off because of sickness, school, etc.), but that is about all. He says that he feels less connected with everyone in his life because there is always a layer between you and others. Socially, he says that the biggest change is just not getting together with other people like he used to. He wishes that the country did a better job weighing the economic cost-benefit analysis before the shutdown. Overall, my parents' lives have been changed because of the pandemic in different ways than mine.