We continue to hear from a lot of parents about the overwhelming challenge of trying to juggle work, parenting and serving as an at-home educator. A popular podcast host and speaker from New Haven, has just published a memoir that she hopes will encourage parents and offer a hopeful perspective.
Melissa Federico, a working mom from Woodbridge, says trying to balance her full-time job as a customer performance manager for a media company, and help her son and daughter with online learning, means some days she works as late as midnight. Federico questions whether it is paying off.
"I'm not 100 percent sure that when they go back to school full time, and that he goes back and he's a junior and a senior, and when he goes to college, that he will have gotten those missing months back," Federico said.
Yale Law School graduate, New Haven author, speaker and podcast host Mary Marantz understands and her newly released memoir, Dirt, takes the reader through a challenging start in life, growing up in a trailer on a remote mountain in West Virginia.
"I am the daughter of a logger, who is the son of a coal miner, both of which barely graduated high school, and in one generation, look what can change. And so anytime it's hard, I can't imagine how many days for my dad it was so hard, and he didn't feel like he could go on, and he probably didn't feel like any of this was making a difference," Marantz said.
She said her life story has a direct message for parents who feel like they're not doing enough.
"You are showing up. You are doing the best you can for your kids, and that's what they're going to remember. They're going to remember the time you spent with them, and they're going to remember that you made the best of an impossible situation," Marantz said.
Within the first few pages of Dirt, it's apparent that Marantz's story is a hard one.
With 2020 being a hard story for so many of us, she said these experiences can end up teaching us in ways that easier times cannot.
"Let this be the year that is a life immersive classroom lesson in being resilient, in falling down seven times, but getting back up eight. Teach your kids that it's OK to fail because failing is not final, it's just the next lesson learned," she said.
CDW has a distance learning hub that has numerous resources that can be found here, including articles on tips for troubleshooting and supporting parents during remote learning.
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