New York subscribers got exclusive early access to this story in our Brooding newsletter. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Around noon on the very first morning of the COVID lockdown, I was working on my laptop at my dining-room table — I didn’t know yet that it would become my desk for the next year — when I got an email from my upstairs neighbor. She and her partner were working from home, she informed me, and she requested that my children quiet down. They were trying to focus, she said. You can imagine how my eyeballs turned molten while reading these words — we were trying to work, too. I couldn’t imagine, that dismal March afternoon, how someone could be so inconsiderate.
It’s funny thinking about it now, because I was about to become an expert on inconsiderate behavior — spotting it, naming it, being accused of it, being guilty of it. The definition of what constituted inconsiderate was about to become the main subject of discussion on all my group chats. I would spend the next several years consumed, to varying degrees, with thinking about what constitutes consideration. In the absence of anything else to do, calling people out for being assholes became something like a form of entertainment during the pandemic years.
And we haven’t really stopped since, have we? The epidemiological reality of COVID was that what other people did became our business, but many of us maladaptively applied that basic rule to our lives and haven’t looked back. Sometimes I think what really stuck with us from the COVID years was a sense of entitlement to the moral high ground. We’ve clung to it, and it’s cost us. I say “us” meaning people who felt strongly about the importance of protecting the most vulnerable, and I don’t think we were wrong in taking that priority very seriously. But we’ve made moral superiority a habit — families in particular. I am wondering if this habit has outlasted its utility.
At the start of the pandemic, there was plenty of judgment to go around, both for people who weren’t cautious enough and those who were considered too cautious. It sometimes felt like every family had their own highly specific definition for what constituted acceptable COVID safety, and everyone who didn’t fall into that narrow path must be crazy. For every act of carelessness that put vulnerable people at risk, there were acts of social surveillance that ratcheted up the feelings of distrust, even within friend groups. COVID theater was an art form we all embraced as much for the sake of our reputations as for the safety of others, which strikes me, in retrospect, as a missed opportunity for real solidarity.
Some of the COVID theater was essentially state-mandated: I spent hours and hours on video calls with nurses whose job it was to watch me swab my nose on-camera so as to fulfill the federal requirements that allowed me to cross the border to be with my mother while she died of cancer. I remember telling friends about that charade hoping to share a laugh with them, but instead they seemed reassured, relieved even. “Measures” were in place. Was all of that helping?
Masking evolved from a commonsense practice to an elaborate ballet of virtue-signaling, especially on social media. I remember worrying about whether my kids were masked up correctly — even in outdoor photos I shared where the risk of germ-sharing was vanishingly low — in case someone might get the wrong idea about my family. I wasn’t worried about my kids getting sick or infecting others. I was worried about my reputation. I am not proud to admit this, but at least I know I’m not alone. A friend was scolded by strangers for having posted a selfie in which she appeared along with two others. There are people I still don’t speak to because of conflicts that took place during the lockdown. I wonder if we couldn’t have kept each other safe without all the social static. You might say that all of this was a small price to pay for saving people’s lives — but I’m not convinced the judgment didn’t do more harm than good.
Meanwhile, an orthodoxy emerged about risk aversion during those years. It dictates that moms like me — confident in the effectiveness of vaccines and masking — are not meant to identify as risk tolerant. (Risk tolerance is widely considered to be at least partly genetic.) Even so much as acknowledging the desire to gather (which, for teens in particular, was really more of a need) became conservative-coded during the pandemic. Five years out, it still feels socially dangerous to publicly admit that I had pretty ample risk tolerance during COVID. It’s difficult in our polarized media environment to admit to feelings of empathy with both sides of the argument about how the pandemic was managed. That is a problem, especially considering some of the most biased and influential voices in “independent media” were initially politicized by lockdown policies.
Many parents are perhaps predisposed to worry extra hard about whether or not they’re doing the right thing. If parents can’t be counted on to be conscientious, who can? Although we didn’t know this at the time, elite consensus buried any dissenting views about the effectiveness of lockdown policies (there’s a fascinating new book out about how this happened), and in parents, public-health officials had their most committed enforcers of every possible rule, regardless of whether there was evidence to support it. COVID truthers had their most committed partisans in parents too, because they were also crusading on behalf of their kids. We all gave it to each other real good.
These are stories that most of us are happy to forget. I know someone who was personally berated by a member of her preschool pod for making the decision to send her kid back to preschool, thereby leaving the group with one less friend. I know someone else who became estranged from their parents over COVID-safety protocols; no one was willing to give an inch in either direction. I felt like my travels to visit my sick mother were being tracked by everyone I knew, and I became wary of the tense, forced politeness with which I was repeatedly asked about the length and strictness of my quarantines.
There were moments, especially early on, when we thought the pandemic would have the unexpected effect of bringing people closer together. In 2020, people mobilized for essential workers and took to the streets for BLM, and there were transformative moments when it felt like the world was changing. But I see very few traces of any of that now, especially among families. COVID is only part of why, of course, but it’s a big part — in particular in the way many families began categorizing outsiders as either trustworthy friends or untrustworthy foes.
Sarah Wheeler and Miranda Rake co-host The Mother of It All, a podcast about parenting, and earlier this spring, they gathered nearly 500 responses from parents about their lingering memories and impressions from the pandemic’s first two years. I met with Rake and Wheeler over Zoom to discuss the survey and their own experiences. “The word ‘trust’ comes up a lot,” Rake said about the survey. “So there were a lot of people who said, ‘I discovered how great my neighbors are.’ And ‘I really have this awesome community, and we all care about each other.’ And then there was the opposite, where people were like, ‘I discovered that everyone around me sucks and like, doesn’t care, especially early on when we didn’t know a lot.’”
Wheeler remarked that isolation made everyone more suspicious of each other; being face-to-face with people makes it harder to judge. “It is so much easier to judge parents on the group chat than at the PTA meeting.” When we spend more time around other parents, it’s obvious that most parents are fundamentally doing the same thing — balancing a bunch of competing priorities. “The healing that we need as parents is some kind of restorative justice circle that’s just like, ‘I’m sorry I judged you during COVID,’” joked Wheeler. (When Dr. Emily Oster made a similar call for generalized forgiveness in 2022, it was received with no small amount of jeers; she had become controversial, some may recall, for recommending that schools reopen sooner.)
Rake, who describes herself as having been among the most cautious of her Portland, Oregon, social group on account of having children who were too young to be vaccinated until well into 2022, was among those who found it easier to choose a level of caution and stick to it rather than constantly reassess as conditions changed. “I kind of decided to die on that hill,” she recalled. “I had decided this is how I take care of my kid. This is how I care for my family. And then it was like I couldn’t shift it.”
The ability to reflect with self-awareness about how we coped with uncertainty is one of the gifts that five years’ time has given us. But not everyone is as willing as Rake is to admit that they might not have been right 100 percent at the time, or that they were making imperfect choices with imperfect information. Rake and Wheeler’s data also includes anecdotes about how young children internalized the powerful stigma that emerged about displaying even mild cold symptoms. If we were side-eying runny-nosed toddlers, they felt it, too.
Even if we’d rather not remember the fissures our quest for the moral high ground caused, you can still see it showing up in how we parent now. Many parents of tweens and teens, for instance, find themselves in a push-pull between giving kids independence and the specter of being accused of “neglect” by not knowing where they are at every moment. They want to let their kids walk around their neighborhoods or take public transit alone, rationally aware that the actual risk of something bad happening is low, but the worry about seeming like they’re relying on the world at large to keep their kids safe holds them back. Relying on others feels like an indulgent and naïve thing to do.
I suspect that the pandemic’s long shadow is part of what makes it hard to risk giving even a passing impression of neglect for your kids. We’ve become accustomed to the idea that whatever is the least risky is what’s best for them. We are wary of being accused of irresponsibility. I’m a community-minded person — at least I try to be — and I spend way too much energy thinking about the remote possibility that my kids’ independence will become someone else’s problem. This reasoning, that reliance on the caution of others rather than taking caution yourself, was the ultimate act of pandemic selfishness.
Unfortunately, this logic has stuck around. We all love the idea of being more communitarian in our habits, but if a toddler is wandering around a coffee shop even semi-untethered, we’re all nervously looking for the parent in charge. No one wants to be the parent that everyone’s looking for, ready to judge.
More From This Newsletter
- How Does ‘Big-Reveal’ Content Shape Our Family Stories?
- Is Annoyance the Most Romantic Emotion?
- Trad or Not, We’re All Nostalgic for a Fake Past