Shortly before his preschool was canceled indefinitely, my five-year-old son contracted from a classmate a brain disease known as Pokémon. Transmitted virally, it affects mostly the young, though not exclusively.
Symptoms include a profusion of yellow trading cards, vocalized yelps that can sound like “Pika! Pika!” or “Char! Char!” and a manic obsession with the moves and hit points of imaginary creatures who are constantly battling each other for no evident reason.
Like many dutiful parents suddenly faced with the prospect of homeschooling small children through the coronavirus lockdown, my spouse and I started out with high-minded notions of the type of education we would give him. Like many dutiful parents of small children who also work full-time, our grand plans took about three days to fall apart hilariously, completely, and permanently.
We had less than half our attention, blunted by stress and exhaustion, to devote to trying to get him to do the things we wanted him to do. He had his full attention, boundless energy, and an array of behavioral weapons at his disposal to devote to getting us to do the things he wanted to do. Invariably, those things involved Pokémon.
By now, two months after schools began closing to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the travails of working parents — especially those whose kids are too young to care for themselves or take online classes all day — are old news. They’ve been vividly chronicled in GEN, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. But they haven’t been solved, and for most families, they won’t be until schools and day cares reopen. (More often than not, it’s moms taking the brunt; and as daunting as things are for couples with a single kid, they’re far tougher for single parents and those with multiple rugrats.) For all the talk of education’s remote future, its remote present is mostly a mess.
What parents have found instead are stopgaps and compromises that allow both them and their kids to get through each day with a minimum of meltdowns. And if the kids manage to learn something along the way, it’s a bonus bordering on a miracle. Our compromise with our five-year-old on Pokémon, forged out of desperation, was this: We gave in completely. That is, we stopped trying to pull him out of his Pokémon world and joined him there instead. We accepted Pokémon’s dominion over our lives in a bargain to salvage a semblance of sanity without delegating our childcare entirely to screens.
It started out as a system of rewards —okay, bribes — whereby he could earn Pokémon cards or episodes for completing various tasks. Gradually, we realized that we could turn Pokémon activities into the curriculum itself. We bought Pokémon coloring books, Pokémon reading books, and Pokémon writing workbooks. Pokémon battles became math lessons as we taught him how to subtract Rockruff’s 50-damage surprise attack from Beedrill’s 130 hit points. He has learned the basics of strategy through the Pokémon card game, in which bringing in your top card too soon can get it eliminated.
To get him outside, we made up games like Pokémon soccer and Pokémon tag. We enticed him on after-dinner walks by replacing the venerable I Spy with a 20 Questions variant called Guess Which Pokémon I’m Thinking Of. As I write this, he’s on Skype with his grandparents in California, who have bought their own deck of Pokémon cards to compare and battle with his.
At one point, to pass the time on one of our walks, he invented a game that involved pretending to spot various Pokémon hiding in nooks and crannies around the neighborhood, then pretending to catch them in his Pokéball to add to his collection. I didn’t dare spoil his creative initiative by informing him that the game he invented already existed and is, in fact, one of the most popular smartphone games of all time.
Sneaking our son’s education into his preferred form of entertainment has proved far more effective, or at least more attainable under the circumstances, than trying to wring entertainment out of educational resources. Months ago, we bought him a set of 100 interlocking counting blocks, with 10 each of 10 different colors, which came highly rated as a learning tool. It occupied him for about 15 minutes before he declared it boring and consigned it to the bottom of his toy bin. A week into our new Pokémon regime, however, he dug the blocks back out: He needed a way to keep track of his cards’ hit points and damage counts. Pokémon sustain damage in increments of 10, so I showed him how each single counting block could stand for 10 hit points. As a result, he’ll enter kindergarten in the fall — assuming schools open by then — with a basic sense of not only addition and subtraction but multiplication and orders of magnitude.
Our compromise with our five-year-old on Pokémon, forged out of desperation, was this: We gave in completely.
But at least we’re teaching him something and doing it in a way that feels like fun to him. And if it’s getting a bit tedious constantly fighting Pokémon battles with him, well, it’s less exhausting than constantly fighting battles with him over activities he’s determined not to do.
I’m offering our story not necessarily as a playbook for other parents to follow but as an example of just one of the millions of unplanned, often unintentional experiments in early childhood education that are taking place in harried households across the country. My kid is being raised by Pokémon; others are being raised by Paw Patrol, Moana, and Frozen or by iPad games or daytime television. The common thread is that, in the absence of organized schooling or even proper homeschooling, corporate entertainment has stepped in as the de facto educational infrastructure for a generation of young kids.
If there’s an advantage to the path we’ve chosen, it’s that our son is mastering academic concepts without us having to force-feed them to him and largely without even realizing it. In the best case, he re-enters school with an implicit understanding that math and reading are not just scholastic requirements but powerful tools that can be deployed in service of fun.
In the worst case, he re-enters school with a mind so addled by Pokémon that he can barely communicate with his classmates and lacks the mental discipline to focus on any lesson that doesn’t involve anime monsters. But if that happens, at least it will mean we all survived.