The Ultimate Guide to Surviving the Lockdown with Kids

With us all now cooped up indefinitely in our homes, it’s natural to turn online for ideas about how best to survive the lockdown. It’s prudent that you’re seeking out advice from those more experienced than you, those for whom this is just another wearily familiar global pandemic. My top tip is simply this: structure is essential in these trying times. So feel free to make use of this handy quarantine-proof schedule written from the Perfect-Parenting perspective of the father of two young children, whose wife is a key worker.

5.47am Stir abruptly to find your eyes meet the demanding gaze of a toddler.

5.51am Acknowledge eventually that this is indeed your child. Prise the hairdryer and loose radiator cap from his hands and firmly bid him to return to bed.

5.55am On his inevitable return, this time with an inexplicably-sourced plug, arise, renappy the child, and begin the first phase of the clothing process.

6.00am Tread gently downstairs to begin the morning’s Educational Session. I recommend beginning with Each Peach Pear Plum, a classic tale that mixes sumptuous illustration with splendid levels of child interaction.

6.02am Turn on Paw Patrol.

6.04am Check emails. Find nothing of substance. You will do well to repeat this essential check every two minutes for the rest of the waking day. Let this serve as your primary diurnal circadian rhythm.

6.10am Focus on the action in the room around you. Begin research on how and why a ten-year-old boy is in charge of the emergency response unit of this dystopian cityscape, and why that service has been delegated entirely to his ill-bred canine harem.

8.05am Resurface from the laptop to find the house in utter disarray, the elder toddler having encouraged the younger to transfer the majority of the household’s cutlery to the toilet bowl. It is imperative at this stage to restore order.

8.08am Turn on PJ Masks and set about foraging for breakfast. Combine three cereals in the bowl for genuinely bewildering novelty, drench in milk, and position – along with elder child – at table. Amuse younger child by throwing chunks from the Frozen (sic!) cereal box hither and thither across the floor. (Wide-ranging personal experiment reveals that these chunks are optimally constructed to be thrown at pace without unwelcome shattering: the day’s schedule will not brook interruption by the vacuum.)

8.12am Return to laptop to research how and why three errant four-fingered children have such deep-networked funding to support their nocturnal skirmishes against a child who should manifestly be in care.

8.40am Close down the videos, podcasts and fan-fiction windows in order to begin your own productive day of remote working.

9.00am Exercise time. Turn on Joe Wicks.

9.03am Mute Joe Wicks.

9.05am With regret, turn off Joe Wicks.

9.07am Rest and recoup. Release the children out of the back door, with strict orders always to stay in view.

9.15am Check Facebook for inspiration. Admire how successfully someone whose names you don’t recognise is able to bake camembert with the full co-operation of her three children, live-in nanny and housebound au pair.

9.55am Turn to Twitter. Take a look at the trending topics and work through them sedulously, repeating the protective mantra ‘We are all in this together’. Make a note in your copybook of the one term that doesn’t involve any of the words ‘Corona’, ‘Boris’ or ‘Wicks’. It just may have something positive to say.

10.33am Retrieve children from the garden, apologising to its owner three houses down. To maintain a safe seven-foot distance from her, rake or hoe the children back within reach. Restore to house and place books before them, alongside a clearly written explanation of how to read.

10.35am Set about booking the next supermarket delivery. Join the queue with British decorum, staring down your four-figure position with stoic indifference.

11.00am Time to dance! While most videos online advise make use of their home studio, it should also be fine to use the kitchen or front drive. For the barre, I find it easiest to use the kitchen work surface (adults) or rear bumper (toddlers). Be sure to enunciate your French so that the children’s instructions travel clearly through the front-door letterbox.

11.30am Creative session: an important time to take your mind off the concerns of the day. Use a honeydew melon, cocktail sticks and marshmallows to mock up a ‘larger-than-life’ Coronavirus. Explain to the children that this is not a game.

12.17pm Let this serve as the preordained time for lunch. Combine bread, plates, cheese, yoghurt, thyme and foraged fragments of Frozen cereal into a ‘construct your own’ feeding frenzy. Encourage inventiveness and self-expression.

12.40pm Quiet Time. Task elder child with reversing the bookshelves that were ordered by colour yesterday, while attempting to lull the younger into the very precisely and clearly scheduled nap time.

1.48pm Gardening is essential for all of us in these trying times. First check whether you have a garden. If you do, and if it can be viewed in its totality without passing through a gate or getting into a 4×4, check on your flowers. Encourage them in a positive but stern voice that, if they just have the right attitude, they will get through the crisis. (If you don’t have a garden, address yourself as one such flower.)

2.02pm Consult the day’s latest death stats with a stiff drink to hand. Sink further into the depths of depression as you smile back at your onlooking innocents.

2.30pm It’s at this stage of the day that you should find time to file your piece on How The Quarantine Has Changed Me. It doesn’t matter what you write, so long as you don’t confess to the mind-numbing tedium you are experiencing.

2.35pm Recheck the day’s death stats: they just can’t be right, can they?

3.00pm It is now time for the day’s ‘one form of exercise’. Strap the children into, onto or behind your bike, loop the city circular for as long as is possible before either the police ask searching questions or the offspring enter full-throated rebellion. Return home jaded and cold.

3.45pm Time for a second Facebook ‘deep dive’. Take a note of those friends who have not yet virtue-shared a picture of how their domestic upheaval has actually produced unexpected bliss. Regret that, in a moment of weakness, you did.

4.25pm Investigate #stayathome challenges which you have heard everyone raving about.

4.45pm You are prodded back into reality by the restless kids shouting ‘Stick the pig’: it seems you have been lying prone and semi-comatose for the last 20 minutes. Rustle up some tea. It can be whatever you like, of course. Still, is important that it be organic, ethically sourced, and multi-course. For inspiration, search Youtube for ‘Gastrobrats’.

5.00pm Switch on the television for a Covid update from the PM (or PM’s nominated but politically unthreatening alternative). Switch off when you realise that every single journalist is guilty of panic-questioning, greedily hoarding two or sometimes three entirely unconnected queries.

5.13pm Switch over to Bing to quell the children’s well-coordinated coup. Ask yourself, again, why ‘Pando’ removes his pants precisely when he does in the opening credits.

6.00pm Serve tea, after saying grace: be sure to pray earnestly for the greater prominence of sunshine, Ocado and Robert Peston.

6.12pm Clean up the remnants of tea that litter the kitchen, adjacent rooms and the stairwell.

6.15pm Welcome home the Key Worker, whose life is infinitely harder than you could ever imagine.

7.00pm Bathe, barter and beg the children to sleep. Dispense with the typical children’s literature and tell your own tale. Be inventive. Perhaps conjure up a make-believe world where children can visit playparks, see their friends, explore the great outdoors and see more of their other parent.

8.03pm Learn from a concerned friend that the creator of Paw Patrol is also the creator of Bob the Builder. Smile that at least one part of your chaotic world falls into order.

8.15pm Recycle the ‘one form of exercise’ by a clandestine cycle to a local park bench. Cry tactically and efficiently.

9.00pm It is now Your Time. Snuggle up next your partner and catch up on the day’s news. Find positives from the absurdly rapid construction of new hospitals, the widescale volunteering of your fellow citizens, and the complete absence of the word ‘Brexit’.

9.25pm You are now press-ganged into downloading the ‘Houseparty’ app, to which you exhaustedly acquiesce.

9.55pm After some initial shock at seeing an image of your haggard face for the first time in ten days, you rapidly hone yourself to perfection in the tragically small pool of Geography trivia questions. Lurk on Houseparty to challenge any hapless friend or family member who has merely come to talk.

10.30pm To fill the aching hollowness that looms within, turn on Newsnight.

10.34pm Allow your mind to drift off and revisit the vexed Pando Question.

10.42pm Give up on it and the supermarket order, letting queuer #638 skip gleefully into your place.

10.44pm Fall into a restless, haunted sleep.

As for tomorrow, fellow quarantiners, don’t worry. With structure, all is well: just rinse, repeat and relax!