Pandemic Forecast: Cloudy with a Risk of Children

It’s high time we focused on what’s happening to our kids.

Wish we could turn back time

To the good old days

When our mommas sang us to sleep…

But now we’re stressed out

Twenty One Pilots

“Familiarity breeds contempt,” Mark Twain said.

The front half of that witticism was actually coined by Geoffrey Chaucer, whose acid observation remains as valid now as it was in the 14th century. Witness the effects of Covid-19 pandemic lockdown measures and restrictions, which stuffed spouses into the same spaces for weeks and months on end. Erase the normal ebb-and-flow of work-life balance, add in heaping helpings of financial stress, season with a needy home-schooling child or two, and what you have isn’t exactly a recipe for marital bliss — it’s a prescription, rather, for the sobering spike we’ve seen in troubled relationships and broken marriages.

After all, as the ancient Roman poet Sextus pointed out, it is absence — not familiarity — that makes the heart grow fonder.

One might have expected, amidst the pandemic, that Twain’s humorous addendum to Chaucer’s truism would also prove correct — that amorous home-bound couples afforded endless time in the sack would…