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Episode 54: Parenting in a Pandemic is about following the facts, navigating fear and figuring out what works best for your unique family.

Dr. Kelly Fradin is a pediatrician, a wife, a momma and an author of Parenting in the Pandemic. She’s a child advocate and she’s here to help us figure out how to navigate this Covid 19 world, returning to school, how delta variant affects our children, and how to make the best decisions for our family during this time. 

Covid 19 has been an incredibly unsettling year due to fear, ongoing changing guidelines and a general rise in the parenting stressors for working parents. Dr. Fradin describes this time of parenting during COVID as the perfect storm to maximize stress. The pandemic has made people feel unsafe to their everyday interactions and that has a profound impact on our mental and physical health. 

Dr. Fradin has studied chronic stress and viruses in detail during her medical training. COVID brought her home from her role working for the Department of Health for New York City into her living room to help her children navigate remote schooling. During this time she felt compelled to write a book to serve other parents and to help them through parenting during this season, and Parenting in a Pandemic was born! 

As a physician the research only gets you halfway, if you are really going to take great care of people you need to understand people, how to work with them and how to take care of them! Kelly shares her heart and passion for people, offering free, comprehensive resoucres on her Instagram channel @adviceigivemyfriends and offers great advice on Episode 54 of Fulfilled – The Podcast. 

Dr. Fradin shares with us that following the facts is key and we should cultivate a system for following the facts instead of fear. These two years of COVID have been and overwhelming stream of facts, a downpour of information that was constantly changing and that constant change is a breeding ground for fear. 

Then came Delta Variant – which is 3x more transmissible – in a time when kids are back in school with not such a large evidence base for transmission and children. With all things, in science and in life, we have to identify what we know and what we don’t know about certain things. When it comes to being the parent in this situation, you don’t need to be bogged down with the scientific studies, unless you’re trained at understanding them and interested in the topics they are sharing about. As parents we need to get some information and use it to inform decisions that are best for our family. We can, as parents, follow the data and use that to reassure ourselves and base some of our decisions on that information.  

And what about COVID vaccines? Dr. Fradin shares her thoughts on the creation of, distribution and administration of these life-saving vaccines and share that, at the time of this blog and this recording, 1.9 Billion people in the World have received at least some dosage of the COVID vaccine, which can be encouraging and reassuring to parents navigating this life of quarantine, virtual learning and more! 

Parents are feeling decision-making fatigue after this year of COVID. We are already making tons of decisions regarding safety and rules, boundaries and exposure to COVID made these decisions feel so much heavier and overwhelming. When it comes to decision making the first and most important to remember is that you have to decide what’s best for you and your family. You are the expert on your own family, the health challenges and navigating the physical and mental health. Creating guidelines of your own for your family can decrease the amount of decisions you are making regarding what you feel is safe and what degree of risk you are willing to tolerate. 

Kelly shares with us her decision making process during this time. First let’s give ourself some grace in this process. It’s rarely a “right” and “wrong” decision, and when there’s no clear winner, you have to do your best to weigh the pros and cons, and just choose! 

Parenting in a Pandemic was born from Dr. Fradin seeing the vast and confusing information about there in the world, overwhelming and confusing parents. So, she embarked on compiling helpful tips and information for parentings who want to show up and do their best during this crazy time. Head on over to www.adviceigivemyfriends.com to learn more about where you can get your own copy! I’ve read it and it was so refreshing to have one single voice speaking into my heart and mind regarding parenting during this season.

Don’t forget to click play to hear the entire interview here!