How to Maintain Your Mental Health While Caring for your Unvaccinated Toddler 17 Months Into a Global Pandemic

Let’s face it: parenting toddlers has never been easy. But with the pandemic stretching well into its second year, the task can often feel insurmountable. This time is hard, and when I think about what I should be doing to take care of myself mentally, my first instinct is to rattle off a list of why it’s all impossible. And...unfair? While the rest of the adults in my life resume activities like working in person, going to bars, and vacation travel, the lag on a vaccine for kids under 12 means that, in many ways, I’m stuck taking precautions like it’s April 2020. 

I have to remind myself, though, that even though pandemic parenthood is hard and steeped in inequity, we have to do it anyway. So...is there anything that can make these long days better? 

START SMALL: LITTLE FOOD RITUALS

“Eat healthful foods” is all well and good if you have endless time and energy, but we all know sometimes breakfast just looks like your kid’s half-eaten PopTart and cold coffee. If you don’t have the bandwidth to prepare healthy meals, think about incorporating some small rituals around food that might put you in a savoring mindset. 

Find yourself drinking cold coffee because you got interrupted seventy times during breakfast? Pour your coffee into a thermos so that every sip stays the temperature you prefer, even if it takes you two hours to drink what amounts to one cup. Make your own trail mix that you like too, and bring it to the park. Have a cup of tea and a decadent cookie during your child’s nap. (I really like this almond tea I used to buy at the grocery store in Qatar.) 

TRY A MANTRA

Come up with a mantra to repeat when things get tense. It helps to repeat a soothing phrase to calm your own nervous system when your toddler is clawing your skin because she doesn’t want to put on her shoes. Take a deep breath in, then think your phrase: We Do Not Negotiate With Terrorists. 

I kid. (Though honestly, that’s not a bad one.) Mostly I like to remind myself: We are all doing our best, or even something as dry as Her frontal lobe is developing. A mantra can help you regain your calm so that you are better equipped to help your toddler regulate their big feelings. 

STRUCTURE YOUR DAY

I was bemoaning my lack of mom friends to a family member recently, and she told me, “Oh, I made all my best mom friends at baby yoga!” 

How nice. If, like me, you had the great misfortune of becoming a mom at the start of a global pandemic, you know that activities are the key to entertaining your toddler and keeping the tedium at bay...and there are no activities. Children’s museum? Closed. Library story time? Still canceled. The months that my daughter would have been suited for baby yoga were spent...in COVID lockdown. 

So what to do when there are still no formal activities? Use the tedium to your advantage. There’s nothing like an empty calendar to get your toddler really used to a set waking-eating-sleeping routine. The more they can come to expect lunch and snacks and naps to appear at the same time each day, the less they’ll fight about it. I also try to spend as long a chunk of time as the weather allows outside every morning. The park is preferable. The back patio (with some mixing bowls, water, and measuring cups) will do, in a pinch. 

In the afternoons, there’s something to be said for a second trip outside for a painfully slow walk around the block, where instead of keeping a brisk pace, I stop to let my child touch a wooden fence, croon at the neighbor’s cat, and wax poetic about her favorite thing: orange traffic cones. Trying to get in the mindset of slow parenting has helped me a lot. (Why are we hurrying? We literally have nowhere to be.) 

CHOOSE YOUR BATTLES

Do I do all my grocery shopping online because it’s easier than trying to fight my toddler on wearing a mask? Yes. Don’t waste energy on fights that aren’t worth it.

Another thing I’ve found useful, when up against a willful toddler, is to ask myself: am I saying no just to say no? This morning at the park, my toddler spotted a truly magnificent (read: filthy) puddle in the parking lot, and ran over to stomp in it. My first impulse was to stop her--to tell her no, to pull her away, to keep her clothes and shoes clean. 

But why? I brought her to the park to have fun and get out of the house and to kill time. So I let her be a child, even though all the other adults in the YMCA parking lot were staring at me like I was out of my mind. And hey, as a timekiller, that bath she had to have when we got back home sure did get us twenty minutes closer to lunch. 

CONSIDER YOUR SPACE

I am not a Montessori mom. I love advice like “swap out your child’s favorite battery-operated toy for a set of neutral blocks.” She’ll never notice! I once read a suggestion about staging your child’s toys at night so that they’re set up in an appealing way for independent play the next morning. (Maybe that toy truck is moving a pile of dried beans!) That’s really adorable, but do you have time to do that every night? Me either. 

I also can’t deny, though, that the toy clutter really contributes to my anxiety. Enter: baskets. Taking five minutes every night to throw my kid’s junk into a basket actually does help me feel like I’m more in control of the chaos, and then I can better enjoy the minimal end-of-day downtime I have left. 

Does my kid have toys in almost every room of the house? Yes. That keeps her entertained and means I can do stuff like...hang up laundry. But every room has a basket. Goodbye clutter, goodbye anxiety, goodbye stepping on LEGO pieces and crying hot tears of rage. 

TAKE TIME FOR YOURSELF

Once you’ve put your toddler to bed, loaded the dishwasher, cleaned up the living room, set the coffee maker for tomorrow, hung up the wet clothes that have sat in the washer all day, and finished Googling “does tinnitus go away on its own,” don’t just stare into space or scroll through Instagram! Make sure your down time is truly restorative. You could try reading a book, learning to knit, or doing something fulfilling like studying a new language...

Okay, I get it. This one is really, really hard. You can’t take time for yourself if there isn’t any time to begin with. And so much of the advice we hear about taking time for ourselves is actually productivity pressure in disguise. 

Hobbies are great, and things like knitting and language-learning can be both fulfilling and relaxing. But you know what else counts as really good time taken for yourself? A nap. I don’t really get any breaks, but you better believe the best thing I do for myself all week is take one weekend day and revert back to infant-mom status and nap when the baby naps.

ASK FOR HELP

All the mom-solidarity on Instagram, kind words from friends, support from your therapist--it’s there to tell you you’re not alone. But it sure does feel that way sometimes. Pandemic parenting has been especially isolating, and even though I know I should ask for help, it’s like...from whom? I can ask for help, but no one can hear me. 

I am having to come to terms with a more realistic version of asking for help. Things like outsource when you can and say yes to grandma and calculating my own mental health in the risk-assessments I’m doing for big decisions like “should I put my child in preschool even when the Delta variant is more contagious than chickenpox??” 

PRACTICE MINDFULNESS, BUT GIVE YOURSELF GRACE

We’ve all been privy to some wistful declaration of “it goes so fast” from a well-meaning but unhelpful stranger as our kid is having a public meltdown. And sure--we know we should try to stay present with our toddlers. Look at this magnificent creature you made! Look at what she learned today with her giant sponge of a brain! 

But it’s pretty hard to channel “these are the most precious days of my life” feelings when you’re singing “Baby Shark” for the eighth time as your toddler flails and shrieks in the bathtub because they don’t want their hair rinsed, you know? 

And that’s okay. Parenting a toddler is a kind of tedious brilliance. There’s the moment they learn how to say “bumblebee,” followed by the moment they scream that they hate Cheerios and they hate you. Not to mention the long hours of reading Little Blue Truck over and over and over again. 

It’s okay not to love every minute. It’s okay to be bored, to be irritated, to count down to bedtime, to think I miss my old life. And it’s possible to experience all of those things at the same time (sometimes the same moment) as you’re thinking, I would die for this tiny, perfect human being whom I love more than life itself. 

Especially in this strange pandemic world we inhabit, where so many of the sanity-saving elements of parenthood have been stripped away, it is normal to have days when things feel really hard for no other reason than everyone is tired and every day feels the same.

And it’s okay, when met with suggestions of how you can survive this time, if your first thought is, “this is impossible.” Give yourself grace. This is harder than it’s supposed to be. It’s not fair, it’s not okay, and you’re doing it anyway. 

Maybe, when we are the age of all the wistful, unhelpful strangers, we will look back on these days and remember all of the bumblebee moments and forget the tears and tantrums. But I kind of hope not. I hope we remember exactly what it was like to be the parent of a toddler in the pandemic years. Not so we can taunt our grandchildren about our life uphill both ways in the snow, but so we can quietly know the capacity of our own strength.