This is my story of being a dad to two young kids while having long COVID. It’s a thank you to my wife, and to the many people who have helped us. Also, it’s sharing some thoughts on the things that got us through.
I’ve had long COVID for two and a half years now. In my GP’s words, “Well, it’s not the worst case I’ve ever seen,” but I feel like I’ve had a bad enough dose of it. For months—stretching into years—I struggled to leave my darkened bedroom. Fatigue, light,t and sound outside of it felt unbearable.
My anxiety levels were high. It felt like I was stuck halfway up a mountain, hanging from a weak rope; a feeling that got worse every time I tried to drag myself out of bed. We’ve got a son and a daughter, our girl has some disabilities. Long COVID with kids is hard. I struggled to push through, to spend five minutes with my kids. In the worst times, I honestly didn’t know how I could ever recover and look after them.
My wife (amazing), helped by babysitters (also great), did most of the parenting for the first couple of years. Grandparents and other family members helped a lot too (thank you!). I was still able to cook—if I had the kitchen to myself—so I made dinner most days and tried to be at the dinner table for a while with the kids.
Emotionally, long COVID scrambled everything. It’s miserable being a parent to young kids, alone in a dark room most of the day, then feeling an almost uncontrollable urge to run from—or yell at—the sound of them playing. The little messes and sudden shrieks that kids make can overwhelm a sick and oversensitised brain. Sometimes I did yell at them, unable to manage my emotions. It was a hard time, trying to rest after that. Guilt added to my misery when I couldn’t help with the kids.
My wife had big health issues too. While I’ve been sick, she’s had weeks in the hospital. During that time, grandparents looked after the kids (thank you!). During my wife’s illness, I tried even harder to push through long COVID. But I found that I couldn’t do that.
Long COVID can be like the strong rip currents lifeguards warn you about at the beach. Sometimes you’ll exhaust yourself trying to swim straight back to shore. You can’t always beat the current. Instead, you need to ask for help, relax as best you can, and wait for the current to get weaker.
My limited time with the kids made it feel more precious. I wanted to be there with them as best I could.
Before I got sick, I’d been on The Incredible Years parenting course. I knew it was really good at the time. But with illness, it really helped me even more.
The course gave me a clear direction to go in with the kids, toward patience and kindness. It made me feel better — when my brain was too scrambled to do much, and I couldn’t understand if anything was working—to keep going in that direction. From The Incredible Years, I learned that parenting is about being a coach. It’s explaining things clearly, with empathy and patience. It’s focusing on really celebrating every small victory.
Part of coaching is understanding what kids want and helping them get there. It felt so good, seeing our daughter say to her brother, “Can I play with you?”—after what felt like 50 million times of us saying, “Don’t chase him around the house, ask him if he wants to play.”
We saw a kids’ magician before I got sick. I’ve really learned something from him too. His show was awesome: full of tricks that went hilariously wrong. There was magic in the kids’ howls of laughter. It helped me connect with my kids to make little jokes about mistakes of my own—putting my own shoe on the wrong foot, or trying to put on their jersey and loudly complaining, “Oh no! What’s happened to my jersey, it’s way too small!”
I found that imagination can build a connection too. When I needed our daughter to sit still for a minute—not her strongest area, to be fair—I would ask things like, “If you had a unicorn friend, what magical land would you go to for morning tea? Lollies land, or fish and chips land, or chocolate cake land?” It bought me time to help her get her shoes on, and made some shared adventure. (If you’re wondering about the reply to my earlier question, it’s “All of them!!!!”)
All of the things above helped. But parenting young kids while having long COVID was still incredibly hard. As I said earlier on, my wife did most of the parenting.
There’s an amazing charity—Complex Chronic Illness Support—that helps people with long COVID. Their team gave me some mindfulness and pacing tools. Using those tools daily, over years, helped to gradually calm my overwhelmed brain. And supported my body to heal. That helped me spend a little more time with the kids—putting up a basketball hoop, throwing a ball around.
My health still isn’t great, but I’m a bit better. With that, and the kids getting older, things have gotten easier, and we rely on babysitters less now. But that’s not really the main thing I wanted to say here. This is mostly to say thank you—to my wife and the many other people who supported us—and also some thoughts on things that helped.
In short, I can say that parenting definitely isn’t easy, and it definitely isn’t about always getting it right (two understatements!). The Incredible Years parenting course helped me a lot. It taught about coaching, patience, and kindness—and holding on to that direction, as best we can. I’ve learned slowly, many times while having low energy and feeling each footstep. This helped me understand that parenting is built from a million small interactions. It reminded me of that old saying “the journey is the destination,” which feels especially true here. For me, what matters most is the aim—that my kids’ journey has many small kindnesses.
Eventually, I understood that working together toward those kindnesses—however we do it, and even if it can only be small things—matters much more than long COVID. Even if the hard stuff is still there, its impact can start to fade.