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Editor's Note: Vicky Ward is a CNN senior reporter. She was a writer and investigative journalist for The New York Times and editor of newspapers and magazines.
(CNN) - I'm a single working mother of 17-year-old twins.
You are a high-performing young man, the type who runs, sings, and does well academically. Her brother, two minutes younger, is a second-year, self-proclaimed nerd. You prefer to live on your computer in isolation, even when it is not actually mandatory.
In ordinary times they are both kind, gentle and intelligent children with whom I have a strong bond. A psychological educational evaluation found that the older twin has extraordinarily high slaughter tendencies.
But that was before covid-19.
In the past week, as New York State's restrictions on socializing have become increasingly stringent, my children have become sharper, more urgent, and insistent about my "overreaction" to patterns of social distancing. .
Note that the oldest has just had their SAT exam and college visits canceled. Like high school students everywhere, they both had their spring semester canceled. Online classes have not yet started. They were supposed to be in Florida during spring break. And they are restless.
In a bitter irony of the moment, the eldest had just gotten a girlfriend. No matter how often I warned him that he and his new girlfriend did not know each other, he ran away, and did exactly that. I told him repeatedly that it is not my family that is at so much risk (my older mother, father and family reside in the UK), but his girlfriend's relatives could be in danger if he is a carrier of the virus. He told me they were a meter and a half away, but I wonder how likely that is.
A few days ago, he went jogging in Central Park, a race that lasted four hours. I asked him what had held him back and he said he had joined a volleyball game, exactly the type of activity that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said should be avoided 12 hours later.
He looked at me like I was a little weak when I squawked my disapproval.
My other son, the youngest twin, atypically, decided this was the ideal week to break his usual isolation. He turned his room into a haven for a not-so-good friend who was wandering around New York City with a backpack and a huge duffel bag in an act of rebellion against his divorced parents. I was on a CNN conference call when this young man came into my home office and asked if he could "explain" what was happening in his personal life, a prelude, I supposed, to ask if he could stay indefinitely.
Politely, actually, not so politely, I sent him home with his alleged parents at war.
I just saw Governor Cuomo say on television that the new state guidelines prohibit unnecessary people in our homes.
On Thursday night, I paid more attention when psychologist Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer told the CNN Forum that the group she was most concerned about under the new guidelines for social distancing were teens.
"Teens are supposed to leave their homes and socialize with their peers and to try new things," he told Anderson Cooper. “And now they are going to have less of that. So they need to find ways to feel their impact and stay connected to the groups that are important to them. "
I called Dr. Schmelzer to get a deeper insight into why she had focused on teens. What he said was reassuring to me and, furthermore, I suspect other parents in a similar situation. First, he said, teens generally just don't have the "ability" or "maturity" to see outside of themselves right now.
"Teens are a group of people for whom risk has always been an issue," he said. "They weigh the risk and this (the covid-19) does not seem so great. Historically we have capitalized on that by sending them to war, so the problem is that they are now thinking about relative risk and they are not. It seems so great to them… Because in that kind of self-independent adult developmental life state, it's about me… it's about what I want. ”
Second, he said, teens would be the worst demographic to cope with covid-19. Yes, worse than teenage girls. "They live in their bodies," he said. "If they don't feel dangerous - (if) there is no physical sensation like standing on the edge of a bridge or doing something physically dangerous, they can't feel it ... the idea that a grandmother could die is too abstract for them."
So what should a mother of teenage children do?
"Stay in the fight," said Schmelzer. "He explains that this is for the health and safety (of the country). What is a war like World War II was. Tell them stories about the wartime sacrifices of your grandparents. Don't expect to happen in one conversation. Stay on it. Keep telling stories. "
He suggested that discussions in military families could be different from those in families without direct personal experience of war. "That is a segregation that we have not discussed," he said.
And what should we do with our exes? Given the high divorce rate in the United States, I am not the only parent facing the problem of how to be the best shared parent at a time that requires physical separation from homes.
"Take a walk with your ex-husband, one and a half meters away, and propose a shared parenting program for the next four months," said Schmelzer. "I don't think separating children from their parents or giving people the ability to say 'Oh well, I can leave my ex now' is a good idea."
I showed this article to my children. Both recognized that Schmelzer had expressed exactly how they felt. "People keep talking about an invisible enemy and it's really difficult to understand," said my youngest son. "If you sent me to war, I would feel useful. Now quarantined, I feel helpless. "
And the oldest? His girlfriend has now left New York City to go to the country. "I feel trapped and alone," he said. But then he smiled, an encouraging sign that he is growing in some perspective and maturity.
"You can write that I feel like Romeo, in 'Romeo and Juliet,'" he said. Then he laughed.
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