Note: The following is an official letter to all pandemic parents of Planet of Earth.*

Dear fellow pandemic parents of the world:

I am a little nervous as I address you all, every person on the planet who has been parenting or otherwise caretaking kids during the pandemic. There are so many millions of you out there, including a number of whom I haven’t yet had the opportunity to meet.

But what I have to say has to be said, for the sake of us parents and our kids. Since no one else is stepping forward, I am gamely going to give it a shot.

The issue has to do with the media reports we are seeing about the degree to which assessment scores increasingly suggest the alarming toll of the pandemic on student learning. We parents are seeing the reports, but the numbers are so abstract, it is hard to know what to do with the headlines.

Meanwhile, back in the real world of our lives, our kids seem as bright, sweet, and occasionally maddening as ever. If they bear any obvious pandemic scars, the issues are likely more on the social front—some unsurprising awkwardness in cultivating friendships in the wake of a year-plus in familial captivity. Really socially awkward.

Here’s the problem, though, and the reason for this letter to the parents of Planet Earth: the reality is that many of us are actually noticing an issue or two in our kids’ learning, but the way our parental brains work, we often aren’t connecting the dots between the big macro problem of lagging tests scores and the micro issues our own children might be having.

It could be a moment when we ask our kids some very basic math questions and they pause longer than we expect. Or maybe it is a moment of surprise when a child misspells simple words. Or we are caught off guard by just how illegible their handwriting is. Or maybe still their handwriting is legible but they struggle to express themselves in writing, nearly paralyzed in situation when they need to string written words together.

What do we think in these moments? It is often not actually thinking. It is primitive thinking, that starts with parental cortisol surging. Our minds go fight or flight. We feel fear and panic: there’s a crack in the beautiful vase that is our child. Something is amiss with our prized young. 

I am speaking from firsthand experience. I have lived this, been spooked by gaps in learning and my mind has immediately gone to the somewhat shame-based thought that there is something wrong with my kids—undoubtedly, my freaking-out-brain tells me, some difficult to treat learning disability, rather than simply seeing reality: this is what pandemic learning looks like.

As I have started raising this topic with other parents, it has quickly become clear that I am not alone, that many are having a similar experience and, thanks to our parent brains, we are thinking it is just our kids, rather than putting two and two together, realizing we are stumbling on what are the nearly inevitable by-products of a pandemic.

Meanwhile, what about the kids? Are the children of the world encountering some gap in their own learning and drawing connections to the historically unprecedented educational scramble that they were subjected to?

That would be a no. Again, that is not the way the mind works. Instead, kids who sense their own learning issues are telling themselves that they are flawed and not sufficiently smart, and feeling the blast of shame that comes with that. And like all kids feeling such shame, they are doing their best to cover up their deficiencies. 

Now that I have outed this issue to the world, what to do? 

I think it starts with not only understanding the near inevitably of the learning issues ourselves, but also communicating this message to our kids, sharing this message about the normalcy of any learning issues they might be fearing and possibly covering up, letting them know that it is not just them. It is a worldwide thing.

This approach is far preferable to a generation of kids feeling that there is something inherently wrong with their minds.

And now, having connected the dots as parents and empowered our kids to understand how normal their issues are, we need to take steps, we parents and kids, to put in a bit of the extra work necessary to catch up when we encounter pandemic-driven learning issues.

Notice that I did not suggest that we should now demand that our teachers and schools to fix the problem.

Schools and teachers, it turns out, have their hands full, as they did before the pandemic. Our educational system was designed to keep learning moving forward, while helping a smaller subset of kids catch up. It was not set up to help a generation of kids vault forward after a world-wide health crisis held them all back.

Besides, you can do this, you and your kids—now that those dots are connected. For those of us parents who can spare the time, and who have been fortunate enough to receive our own uninterrupted educations, it just takes acknowledging the issue and then putting in a bit of extra work to supplement the education that is underway in schools. 

We live in a world of apps and information and resources to make this work of catching up, of addressing gaps all the easier. As long as we take the time and do the modest heavy lifting. And for those of us parents blessed with some extra time, possibly helping out children other than our own to catch up through some volunteering.

Parents of the world, we’ve got this.

The fine print: details, action steps, disclaimers

• For parents looking for a place to start helping their kids catch up in different areas of foundational learning, a number of posts on this site are aimed at providing such guidance, including: Time to Write, Math Scales, and Be the Bridge.

• Another step that is available to visitors to the site: feel free to reach out to me directly with any questions about potential resources, tools, or strategies for helping your kids.

• *The reference to all parents of the world is intended as a mildly humorous device to make the point to parents regarding just how not alone their kids are with any learning issues they may be having. It is understood that, tragically, not all children on the planet currently have the benefit of attending school, with 2020 figures suggesting that approximately 90 percent attend primary school and 66 percent secondary school. Strategies for closing this other gap will be fodder for future posts and efforts on behalf of those of us whose kids can attend schools.