The pandemic has resurrected the vintage proverb ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. One year on, as the Covid-19 pandemic takes its toll around the world, necessity has pushed homo sapiens to reinvent the way we live, eat, work, study, party and holiday. Latest information communication technologies are being adapted, applied and reshaped to ensure compliance with rules, laws and regulations related to lockdowns, social isolation and distancing. Offices and schools have gone digital with adults and children working and studying from home. Shopping, concerts, conferences, parties, weddings/ funerals, and food delivery services, have also gone online to eliminate in-person interaction. Likewise, the pandemic has reinvented leisure, travel and vacations. With long haul domestic and international travel becoming tedious and unsafe, new pandemic era vacation options such as staycations, workations, camping trips, home-cation, virtual tours among others, have emerged as safe options. For instance, Google, AirPano, and Panoramas offer virtual tours of the seven wonders of the world while the Google Arts & Culture project has digitized millions of objets d’ art of the most well-known museums of the world including The Louvre, Paris. Moreover, the pandemic has forced the newly liberated great Indian middle class to rediscover domestic tourism options which require less travel time. In this summer issue of ParentsWorld we present a guide to making the most of your family summer holidays in these pandemic times where the holiday/vacation is more desperately needed than ever before. There’s much else in this April issue. Check out the Early Adolescence story on why parents must avoid ‘parentification’ of children. In Activity Zone there’s a specially curated list of movies to develop emotional intelligence within children. Moreover, our highly-qualified columnists, the UKbased parenting expert Sue Atkins and well-known pediatrician Dr. C.N. Kamalarathnam, answer parents’ queries ranging from improving children’s concentration skills to breastfeeding troubles.
