Retired Daviess County school teacher Nancy Skiadas recently posted on social media asking friends to go grocery shopping for the elderly with her, but her effort to help seniors during the COVID-19 pandemic quickly came to a halt when her son Ben gave her a reality check and “grounded her.”
“I put my foot down and I said no, you’re grounded — you can’t go out, this is serious,” Ben said. “I’m not willing to risk your life on it, so sit at the house, and if you need anything, let me know and we can figure it all out from there.”
Ben, 36, pointed out to his mom that she is an “old person.”
Nancy, 65, said it was a bit of a rude awakening that she and her husband George, 77, falla in the at-risk age group for the coronavirus. Nancy said when she made the post she was thinking about her own mother, who also doesn’t think of herself as old.
“We’re the old people who we were thinking about going to help,” Nancy said.
The conversations were nice and suggestive at first, Ben said, but he realized it was going in one ear and out the other for his active parents. He said he finally laid down the hammer when he saw his mom’s post on Facebook.
It was a role reversal, Nancy said, and she’s not alone — others have commented saying they too have been grounded by their children.
Ben said he has been helping his parents run some of the errands to keep them safe at home.
“There’s a shift with our millennial kids who are grounding mom and dad,” Nancy said. “He’s taking care of us.”
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