Jess Lilley is a creative director at Leo Burnett.

When I first chatted to Phoebe about this, we were living in different times.

Lockdown was looming and we had no idea what lay ahead. With a baby and now a 6-year old permanently at home, I worried about keeping the older one occupied and positive. Kids are sociable creatures. Suddenly his life was upended and his world had shrunk.

The premise was to ask creative parents how to keep kids inspired in iso.

If you can’t go to the skate park, bring the skate park to your driveway.

In our house, we were making it up. I reduced screen time for reading, crafting, bashing on a drumkit and bike rides around the neighbourhood. And with skate parks closed, we built a ramp in our driveway. Which seemed extreme. I wondered what other parents were doing.

Illustrator and creative legend, Beci Orpin, came to the rescue with Easy Iso Craft—simple projects using household items.

Performance artist and celebrant, Tania Smith, brilliantly suggested a loungeroom wedding ceremony. “First, find your happy couple. Maybe you want to marry a chair with a rubber glove? A slotted spoon and a peg? Look around for a perfect pair. Write the story of their love. Who are they really? How did they meet? Create a back story you can tell the guests at the ceremony. “

“Then make wedding outfits,” Tania continued. “Hint: toilet paper is usually a great mock wedding dress but that’s been cancelled. Cut up some useless white business shirts instead.

“Stage your once-in-lifetime, true love ceremony. Love prevails!”

Genius.

I also turned to author, Lorelei Vashti, who recommended ABBA as a failproof way out of any rut. “It resets all of us and after a bit of a singalong—or even just a listen-along-in-the-background—everyone is feeling much more capable of conquering whatever formidable task is in front of them (getting dressed, walking to the mailbox, eating dinner).”

Armed with these suggestions, we were ready. Then home schooling took over.

Now, kids were trying to adapt to life in lockdown the same way we all were—fumbling through a gazillion online platforms to complete a day’s work.

Suddenly it wasn’t so much about trying to keep them inspired as trying to get through the tasks they had to achieve that day.

Not to mention the shock to our parental systems.

We became even more tethered to the home and yet further than ever from our comfort zones.

With that, my own motivation to create vastly diminished. The combined onslaught of teaching, increased domestic responsibilities and the spectre of death hanging over your head will do that to you.

How was I going to make life interesting for my child if I couldn’t find anything interesting about the world myself?

I spoke to my friend, Ching-Li Chew, a graphic designer living in London, and mum to two school-aged girls, to see how she was coping. She gave me some much-needed perspective.

“You can’t be a rock for your kids if you are feeling unhinged.”

I nodded, screwing the cap back on the wine bottle.

As well as having a fully stocked craft box for all occasions, Ching-Li has found it important to help her girls face the pandemic head-on with positive action.

“We have a close-knit community and we’ve been delivering groceries and running errands for those in quarantine. It’s been invaluable for the girls to be a part of this.”

A vital aspect of shepherding our kids through this has been giving them space to process their own emotional responses, just as we have tried to process ours.

When my son lamented lost play dates and, “not being able to hold my friends’ hands anymore,” my bruised heart cried out for mercy. But encouraging him to talk more helped him carve his own path through the madness.

Jess’ 6-yr old has turned to expressing himself via song lyrics in these troubling times.

It’s one of the reasons Lorelei turned to ABBA: “The emotions expressed through their music—sadness, longing, defeat, loss, love and joy—are just so easily felt, and purged”—even if her kids are hooked on the Mamma Mia version rather than the original.

“I’m usually an ABBA purist, but desperate times call for desperate measures.”

Now, as I write this, a dramatic new change is imminent. The kiddo has just dragged his bag of school clothes into my office (i.e. the shed) to see if anything fits ahead of his return to the classroom tomorrow (we’re organised like that).

So, in the time I’ve conceived, pitched and written this article, it’s become redundant.

None of you need lockdown inspo for your kids anymore. Such is the wild ride we’re on.

The next test will be to see what the fallout for our little people will be from all this. Ching-Li hopes it won’t be too bad. “I just want them to remember this as a fun time where we got to spend loads of nice time together. Accept there will be good days and not so good days—but by the end, if they know how to varnish a garden bench, cook a meal and make a drum out of a Milo tin, that’s fine by me.”

London Graphic Designer, Ching-Li Chew, puts her kids to work varnishing a bench.

I too remain optimistic. Watching my kiddo problem solve in every aspect of his day has been one of the highlights of this experience. Yesterday I found a song he’d written on his own, a passionate treatise about his love for rock’n’roll. Before iso, he might not have put pen to paper like this.

We are not out of this yet. But we’ve always got ABBA and mock weddings for the uncertain times ahead. And I have enormous faith in the resilience of kids, and their inbuilt ability to find inspiration in the moment.