Seemingly, every school district in the United States has closed schools leaving parents to home-school their children. Looking beyond that, they are under the same self isolation and quarantine orders as their parents are. That leaves parents and children home and away from the outside world.

This is hard on everyone, especially our children. They are unable to see their friends. Their activities, like Little League, are being postponed or canceled. This leaves us as parents looking for ways to engage them and to make them feel normal.

Certainly, FaceTime helps, but that only works if the other parents have an iPhone as well. It is also somewhat restrictive in that it limits it to one-on-one interaction. It would also be beneficial if you could get a group of friends together in a fashion similar to what they normally do.

On that note, many have been utilizing Zoom to have office meetings and the like. Seeing how effective it has been for work, we should also be looking to use it for our children to allow them to see and speak with their friends.

Get together with the other parents and schedule a time where you can all have your children speak to one another using Zoom. You can do it as one-on-one or much larger groups. It also helps carve out the time to make sure everyone does it.

Think of this like Little League practice. For example, let’s say you were going to have Little League practices on Wednesday at 6:00 P.M. Now, instead, you can make that Zoom time. How long you want to do it for is up to you and the other parents.

It doesn’t matter if  you have hours to spend or if you just have 5-10 minutes. Every little bit helps your children see their friends and help them feel normal at least for that small time frame. You know you have that time somewhere in your schedule over the course of a week. Find it and coordinate with other parents to do it and help you and your children through this process.