Time’s about to get reeeeeal heavy on our hands, especially with restless, bored kids – from infants on up to college students – suddenly home from day care, school and pretty much every extracurricular activity, in an unprecedented attempt to curb the spread of a global coronavirus pandemic.
Are play dates OK to pass the time?
It depends who you ask. Asaf Bitton, a Boston-based primary care physician, wrote a widely shared Medium piece calling on parents to commit to “no kid playdates, parties, sleepovers or families/friends visiting each other’s houses and apartments” during school and other closures related to coronavirus.
“This sounds extreme because it is,” Bitton wrote. “We are trying to create distance between family units and between individuals. It may be particularly uncomfortable for families with small children, kids with differential abilities or challenges, and for kids who simply love to play with their friends. But even if you choose only one friend to have over, you are creating new links and possibilities for the type of transmission that all of our school/work/public event closures are trying to prevent. The symptoms of coronavirus take four to five days to manifest themselves. Someone who comes over looking well can transmit the virus.”
On the other hand, infectious disease physician and epidemiologist Eli Perencevich told the NewYorkTimes that play dates are fine, with proper precautions, and trying to isolate yourselves and your kids from everyone else over the coming weeks “would be impossible.”
“Dr. Perencevich recommended organizing play dates around an isolated outdoor activity,” the New York Times reported. “Invite another child to come along on a family hike. Or have the kids run around in a big, uncrowded park, which will be less germy than a popular local playground.”
I called Scott Goldstein, a pediatrician at Northwestern Children’s Practice and instructor of clinical pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, to get his input.
“There’s no one right way of handling this,” Goldstein said. “The American Academy of Pediatrics hasn’t put out a specific recommendation saying, ‘Stay at home and don’t do play dates.’ And you go online, and everybody has their viewpoints and I’m seeing a lot of parent-shaming, which isn’t helpful.”
If play dates are optional – you don’t need to host a child whose parents have to go to work or attend to something mandatory; you don’t need to drop your child at a friend’s house for similar reasons – “it’s probably best to avoid them,” Goldstein said.
But he didn’t want to go as far as Bitton and outright ban small, social get-togethers.
“If nobody in your house is sick and nobody in the other house is sick and you want to get a couple of kids who are not sick together to do something creative,” he said, “I think that’s something a reasonable person could feel comfortable with.”
He emphasized that the risk of contracting coronavirus remains low for children and that the vast majority of people who do contract the illness don’t experience severe symptoms.
But there is wisdom, he said, in trying to “flatten the curve,” meaning we each do our part to limit how fast and far the virus spreads by taking social distancing measures where we can.
“Before this blew up, a lot of people, even me, were saying, ‘This is something that just has to run its course like the flu does every year, and people are going to get it, and some people are going to get sick like they do with any virus and then it’s going to go away,’ ” Goldstein said.
“But then it became more clear that people are getting more sick from this than they do with your typical flu season. … So the idea with flattening the curve is that if you limit the exposure to people, it’s going to build up at a much slower level, which makes the peak much lower, which lets the health care system accommodate the sick people, which also then prevents them from spreading it.”
I like that approach. I’m going to do everything in my power to adopt that approach, I told Goldstein, including not letting my kids have friends over or go to friends’ houses while their schools are closed through March 30.
“Everybody is going to have their own comfort level,” he said. “There’s no one right approach.”
And no two families’ lives or schedules or sets of needs look the same, I realize.
But for me? With the privilege of a job that allows me to work from home, and a budget that allows me to buy groceries and supplies ahead of time, and a (thus far) generally healthy family that doesn’t have to venture out to address a chronic medical condition: I’m going to hunker down and try to flatten that dang curve.
“The big burden of flattening the curve has already been put on families by canceling school and all activities,” Goldstein said. “That’s a huge way of flattening the curve, and that’s going to go a long way toward helping, way more than one person not having one play date.”
Fair enough. These are scary times, and the recommendations and statistics are changing rapidly. I certainly don’t want to judge anyone’s approach to this pandemic.