Not quite a week ago, I blogged about parenting during the Great Adventure of 2020. I wrote about how I was giving my kids time outs because it felt like the loving thing to do. Their whole world has gone topsy turvy. If I let them crap all over our rules, that might scare them even more. When I wrote that post way back on April 1 (truly, an eternity ago), I believed all the things I wrote.

But things keep changing quickly. My life has changed so much during the past four weeks, it takes my breath away. You know how Facebook Timehop shares memories from a year or decade ago? I think they should start posting memories from February and early March 2020. Holy crap, I went to an amusement park in February 2020? Twice?! I had never even heard of social distancing! Remember that corndog at California Adventure? Jesus, that was a delicious corndog.

My thoughts and beliefs also keep changing quickly during this adventure. I wrote a post about giving all the time outs necessary to enforce boundaries on April 1st; and then one or two days later, as I went to bed, a thought floated to the surface of my consciousness: What if I give more hugs than time outs? The idea seemed ridiculously important, so I grabbed my iPhone and sent myself an email with the subject line “more hugs, less time outs.” I didn’t write myself a message. I knew the subject line was enough.

The next morning, whenever I heard one of my kids getting snarly or cranky, I came over and asked if they needed a hug. They always did, and wow, the hugs usually do the trick. Voices become less whiny, fights turn into laughing fits. Since making an effort to give more hugs before sending the kids straight to time out at the slightest suggestion of an infraction (Do not pass Go! Do not collect $200!), there have been close to zero time outs in the Novak household.

I still get frustrated with my kids. It’s tough to spend all day, every day, in the same house with them. I’m an introvert who needs some solitude to feel like my best self, and true solitude is just not happening these days. I sequester myself into another room, shut the door and put on headphones to tune out the babble, but there’s always the possibility that a child will come stomping in and interrupt my writing just as I’m getting into the flow.

But as tough as this is for me, the Great Adventure of 2020 is even tougher for my kids. (Quick note: I think of sheltering at home as the adventure because that word is more uplifting to my spirits than “crisis” or “shit storm.” I don’t think of the pandemic as an adventure. It’s a fucking pandemic.)

My kids do not have all the coping mechanisms that I have for processing this adventure. They do not have a therapist; they do not write in their journals (Julian can’t even write!); shit, they do not even know any good swear words and holy shit, sometimes a girl just needs to drop the F-bomb for a moment of psychic release.

My kids do not even fully understand what is going on. Their grasp on time is tenuous at best. They want to know when we will have Pippa’s birthday party (it was supposed to be in late March), but if I tell them, Oh, maybe June, probably July, they will lose their minds. June or probably July? That’s like seven lifetimes away!

My four-year-old does not understand that in ten years, he will have only very hazy memories of this time. He might remember that for a couple of months, he got to play a lot of soccer with his dad on the front lawn. He won’t remember how much it sucked to suddenly lose his pack of preschool pals. But he’s never been 14 or 24 or 34 and just doesn’t have the perspective that age gives.

My seven-year-old does not understand that it’s better to miss the last two months of first grade than the last two months of fifth grade. She gets to go back to her elementary school next year. But the fifth graders? They are losing those final glorious months of being the kings and queens of elementary school. When they go back to school, they’ll be at some new place, at the bottom of the middle school trash heap. But Pippa does not understand that. She loves first grade, and all she knows is that the occasional Google Hangouts with her classmates is an abysmal substitute for the real thing.

So right now, I am trying to remind myself that this experience is tougher for my kids so I can have some compassion when they turn into little Tazmanian devils. They need lots and lots of hugs so that they can feel secure and cozy during this strange moment in history.

Of course, hugs are not some magical wand that turns my kids into to perfect angels. They are children and children are people and people have feelings that need to be felt and expressed. And maybe here’s the point that I have been trying to figure out whilst writing this post (because yes, writing these blog posts helps me figure shit out): when I give my children time outs for being cranky and breaking tiny rules, I am telling them that their feelings are not welcome and should be suppressed; but when I give them hugs instead, I tell them that their feelings are indeed welcome and beautiful.

OH HOLY HELL.

Yep. That’s it. I literally just figured this out mid-post. When my kids misbehave, I need to pay attention to what is happening. If they are expressing tough feelings, then I need to help them with those feelings instead of sending them to their rooms to suffer alone.

When they are jumping on the couch these days, it’s because they have energy to burn. I tell them to stop and turn on music for a dance party. If they do something super taboo, like try to swing from the ceiling fan while juggling fire, then their cute little asses need to go straight to time out.

But most of the time, their misbehavior might be annoying AF, but they are also cries for help. It’s their way of saying, Yikes! Big feelings alert! I don’t know how to cope! If I react to the minor rule violations with an automatic time out, I am missing an opportunity to connect with my kids. I am instead sending the message, Your feelings are bad so go away. That’s not a message I want to send!

And that is why, at bedtime a few nights ago, my intuition told me to favor hugs over timeout. It took me a few days, and a really long blog post to figure out why hugs are so important during this adventure, but hey, I got there in the end.

(And if you got to the end of this post, I’d like to give you a big hug when social distancing is over.)