Recognizing our kids’ growing social isolation, my wife and I tried to compensate by adopting a puppy. “Dad,” my 10-year-old asked one evening as I confronted the dishes, “speaking as a Boomer, is it harder to make friends as you get older?”Īctually, I said, I’m Gen X. But for me, middle-aged and increasingly exhausted, time slowed to a crawl, turning each day into trench warfare. For my daughters, stuck at home with their parents and still detached from their social lives, time started to spin faster, shredding their remaining days of childhood. Then extended quarantine started to pull us in separate directions. My younger daughter, 8, and still all elbows and knees, helped me concoct fantastical adventures, forcing her sister’s alter-ego to choose between risking death to save injured goblins or playing it safe to protect her fellow adventures.

My older daughter, 10 years old at the time, with new glasses and a growing collection of high-waisted jeans, spent hours crafting an elaborate back story for her character, a moon-elf sorcerer named Glory who was intensely loyal to her friends and harbored a blind hatred of injustice.

My heart nearly burst when my girls fell in love with the role-playing narrative adventure game I had once enjoyed so much. The high point of this period was a weeks-long Dungeons & Dragons quest. I even let my girls stay up late to watch “The Last Dance,” the documentary series about Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, so I could show them one of my childhood heroes and they could dye my hair just like Dennis Rodman’s. Their teachers were struggling to put together half-days of online instruction, so I filled the void with “Dad School,” folding my children into a world full of all my favorite things.

īack in the spring of 2020, before my tween daughters became obsessed with Minecraft YouTube, I thought I had pandemic parenting figured out. This story about The Dream SMP was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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