‘I’m sure lockdown is worse for the children’: Have my parenting skills been exposed by coronavirus?

In the latest of his reflections about place and pathway, Will Gore recalls a trip to the woods that left him in a panic, questioning his skills as a parent

Is lockdown harder on the parents or children? (PA)

Anyone living with their children must surely have had occasion to question their parenting skills over the past two months. In the age before coronavirus, most people with kids seemed to spend their time wishing they could see more of their offspring; now it’s a reality, I suspect many mothers and fathers are desperate for some familial distancing.

I have certainly found out some bitter truths about the dad part of myself. For one thing, I am less patient than I had liked to imagine; for another, I’m depressingly less imaginative than I’d thought. I read or hear stories in the news about men who have built Anglo-Saxon roundhouses with their kids as part of home-school history lessons. And yet there am I, struggling to persuade my five-year-old to draw the most cursory picture of a triceratops. If it’s not good for my state of mind, I’m sure lockdown is worse for the children.

Yet I wonder too if it was ever thus when it comes to being a parent; the present crisis has simply brought every inadequacy into sharper relief.