Source: @tomaspalomo
One of the most difficult things is technology, although it brings benefits in many ways, it can also be detrimental in others. We must always be attentive to what children see on TV when they are connected, we have discovered that not all children's programs are the same or suitable for all children because of the type of content they deal with. Before we had our children, I thought that cartoons were all the same, today I have discovered that depending on their age there are some that they can watch and others that they cannot. For example, a few months ago we began to notice in Isabella a very aggressive behavior when resolving conflicts, things that neither her mom nor I do, she immediately went to blows against her brother when she wanted to take away a toy or that he did something, even one day we saw how she used a wrestling move against her brother and we are talking about a little 3 year old, that alarmed us a lot and we began to pay more attention to children's programs that they liked and we thought they were harmless.
It happened that there was an animated series about robots that fought and thus solved everything they thought was wrong, but they did it using force and violence, that day when I watched the series with her I discovered how my daughter imitated the movements of these robots in a mechanical way and that is where she got her violent behavior from. Explaining to a little 3 year old that this was not right was difficult because she only repeated "but they win, they are the good guys and they fight". From that moment on, I decided that I had to pay more attention to the fact that not everything was appropriate, even if it was about cartoons or children's series.
Source: @tomaspalomo
Homeschooling is also a challenge, both my wife and I come from presential schools and well we are both engineers, although today we dedicate ourselves to other jobs, we do not have a pedagogical background. However, my wife who works from home has looked for strategies that adapt to each of them, I have discovered that Diego has a sensory learning, he needs to touch, see, do to understand what everything is about, on the other hand Isabella is more auditory and visual, she grasps things quickly and even though she is younger, perhaps by imitating her brother, she is already advanced in reading and recognizing numbers.
Socialization has also become a real challenge, in our case in our country we have been home schooled for two years and just this new school year the children are attending school twice a week. At home there are only four of us and we live in a gated community of only 20 houses of which only 12 are inhabited and there are no other children with whom they can share. I must admit that because of the fear of the pandemic we have not exposed the children to other people and this has brought as a consequence that they feel fear when they are with other people, but nowadays we have improved a lot as a family, and last year when the confinement became more flexible our closest relatives have been able to visit us and little by little the children have changed their attitude of fear towards people, which we hope will improve when other activities can be initiated. We as a group are very close but even my wife and I try not to have much contact or outings that expose us to the virus.
Source: @tomaspalomo
There are many challenges that we still have to overcome and I know that with family unity we will be able to do it, at present we have established schedules for learning and entertainment tasks. We have routines and we are gradually getting organized, it is not easy, I insist, each of the children has its own personality and that makes each one autonomous and independent in what they want. But in short, although being a parent is a challenge, it is the best and most wonderful in the world, one that is surpassed every day with something new to learn and that step by step fills us with satisfaction.