Pandemic parenting in COVID carnage

Last year mums and dads navigated online classes, chores, sometimes sickness. This year, they’re talking to their children about death and a disease they aren’t sure whom it will get next

Suneeta Verma, whose husband died of COVID, is focussed on making ends meets, so she can bring up her six-year-old daughter to do better than to work in other people’s houses for little money. Sneha Mitra* is looking for a counsellor for her four-year-old son. The family lost two elderly relatives whose laps he would fall into daily. He is expressing his grief in the way children his age would, with anger, distraction, and clinginess to his mother who also went into COVID quarantine. Jatin Singh is confronting his own mortality, and though he has put in place mechanisms to take the virus head on, he worries, wondering aloud whether to adopt a COVID orphan.