Covid-19 Has Also Closed Other People’s Houses

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In 1826, Frederick Douglass, a young enslaved orphan, was shipped from a plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore to a home in Baltimore. Upon crossing the threshold of the new place, his conception of the world, and of himself, changed forever. “I had been treated as a pig on the plantation,” Douglass later wrote. “I was treated as a child now.” Along with this magical new sense of his own humanity, Douglass soon learned a skill that became the foundation of his life: reading.

The transformation of Frederick Douglass from property to statesman is an extreme case. But for millions of kids, other people's houses contain new worlds, with the potential for new meaning and new lives. A friend's house is a learning experience unlike any available in school. It's a chance to examine your own life, and the way your family lives and relates to one another, in the light of a different model. It's also an experience all but foreclosed by the coronavirus lockdown, compounding the damage done by shuttered classrooms.

Alice Fothergill, a sociologist at the University of Vermont, co-authored a book about children whose lives were disrupted by Hurricane Katrina. In an email, she wrote:

In my research on families in crisis, we definitely saw that children and youth needed that interaction with other adults outside their families. Indeed, those other adults were crucial during Hurricane Katrina recovery — we saw them as a safety net for kids. Also, we found that families really relied on other families for informal support, resources, transportation, company, child care, etc. Many of those families are those you are talking about — the families of the kids' friends. We saw that, in the disaster aftermath, not having those other families nearby or available became an incredible challenge.

In some cases, the households of friends reinforce what kids learn at home. One study suggested that closely networked families “develop common norms for behavior that constrain children's actions, increase communication with one another about children's activities and whereabouts (with resulting benefits in terms of their own ability to monitor and supervise children) and develop shared norms for evaluating children's behavior.”

Friend's houses can also be departures from the norms on display at home. What I valued from my own childhood was discovering what was different about other kids' houses and lives, and perhaps adopting some of it as my own. Matthew's house was packed with siblings yet it projected an aura of easy calm and confidence. How did that work? At Philip's house, I learned you could grab a guitar and make your own music, which had never occurred to me before. Bill's older brothers had a record collection that has followed me through life — and their meticulousness in caring for their stuff made me wonder why I was so careless about mine.

Exposure to other families “can provide a different template for relationships,” emailed psychologist Katherine Rosenblum of the University of Michigan. “The egocentrism of earlier years gives way to a sense that not all families are ‘like mine' in their relational patterns, but also potentially in terms of culture, practices/beliefs etc.”

Learning there is more than one way to do things is foundational. My friend Daniel Pink, an author of books on business and human behavior, recalled: “In my childhood (or at least the childhood that my memory has confected) the revelations were always around food. Whoa ... their tuna salad tastes so different! They put mustard on that? They're allowed to drink Coke? Also, Jim Goodrich had a refrigerator that made ice in the door — which to 8-year-old was more amazing than space travel.”

To a child, these are not trivial discoveries. After all, if their tuna salad tastes better, perhaps it's worth considering their religious or political beliefs, or examining more closely their interpersonal dynamics. Pluralism rests on a delicate platform of such minute observation and comprehension.

The pandemic will have devastating consequences for students who fall behind because they lack the structure and support they need to learn at home. For some of those same kids, and for others besides, closing a window onto the lives of others will be equally damaging. I can't remember much about the classrooms of my youth. But I vividly recall the lessons I learned in other people's houses.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.