Chapter 13: Carousel Parenting: Up, Down, and Around We Go Again

Originally known as the Carousel Center, the Syracuse mall is home to an iconic, 111-year-old carousel (Moriarty, 2020). My 3 and 5-year-old sons eagerly await a ride each time our family visits the mall, yet the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the gentle circling of hand painted horses, their rolling ups and downs, and their quintessential melody to a silent halt. While this may be trivial to some, it is the incessant compounding of such trivialities which created difficulties for my wife and I as we parented young children during the pandemic. It is leaving preschool for spring break and never returning to see your friends again or to say goodbye to your first teacher. It is your out of state grandparents cancelling their visit at the last minute due to new travel bans. It is playground after playground wrapped in caution tape, waving at your quarantined friends through the window, and realizing that adult church is much different than the canceled children’s programming. It is the long-awaited birthday party streamed on Zoom, living with stressed and overworked parents, and learning, as my 5-year-old has, to summarize these disappointments with a sigh and an “Oh, it’s the virus.”