Mary Katharine joins the podcast to discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected kids. We cover the mask debate, including how many countries in Europe have chosen NOT to mask their kids. We also discuss the strange trend of asking children to do the heavy lifting of protecting adults — should kids be forced to be resilient? Last, Mary Katharine shares her insight on balancing a career, husband, three kids, and a dog. Can women really have it all?
Mary Katharine Ham is a nationally prominent journalist, author, and speaker. As a CNN political commentator, she brings conservative perspective mixed with a humorous take on politics and pop culture. In 2016, she moderated an ABC News 2016 GOP presidential primary debate in New Hampshire, which featured nine candidates. Ham is the co-author of End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun). Ham has written for USA Today and The Atlantic, and appears on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” She serves on the board of the veterans’ service organization, The Travis Manion Foundation.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and we have a great episode for you today. Mary Katharine Ham joins us to discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected kids. We’ll get into the mask debate, including how many countries in Europe have chosen not to mask their kids. We’ll also discuss the strange trend of asking children to do the heavy lifting of protecting adults. Should kids be forced to be resilient? Last, she’ll give her insight on balancing a career, husband, three kids, and a dog. Can women really have it all? Well, before we bring her on, a little bit more about her. We’re sure you already know her, but here is some background. Mary Katharine Ham is a nationally prominent journalist, author, and speaker.
As a CNN political commentator, she brings conservative perspective mixed with a little humorous take on politics and pop culture. She is the co-author of End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun). And she has written for USA Today, The Atlantic, and appears on NPR’s All Things Considered. Finally, she serves on the board of Veteran Service Organization, the Travis Manion Foundation. Mary Katharine, thank you so much for joining us today.
Mary Katharine Ham:
Hello. Glad to be here.
Beverly Hallberg:
Fun to have you on. I want to start by just talking about what you choose to share on social media. You’re very open about being a mother, the ups and downs of being a mom. You recently got a dog. You were married, I think, a couple years ago, and even recently you co-hosted The View. I think one of the things all women struggle with when they’re working, especially if they have kids, is how do you juggle it all? So do you juggle it all? Are you wonder woman? I know you’ve dressed as wonder woman before, but are you wonder woman?
Mary Katharine Ham:
Well, I think if you look around my scene here, I’ve given my office to the baby, and so you can see my random stuff in the back of my bedroom. So that’s a picture of juggling it. We got workout jugs here and we’ve got my diaper bag. Sometimes, that’s what having it all looks like, is that everything sort of collides. And I’m very comfortable with that.
One of the things that I think is necessary in trying to have all those things is to know that the boundaries are going to overlap, right? And what I did with my career, in hopes that I could raise children and be with them, was navigate to a place that allowed me to be more flexible and allowed me to be home more often. Obviously, the pandemic accelerated that trend quite a bit, but I was pointing in that direction even before I had kids, hoping that I could be here, that I could be at the house, that pediatrician appointments would not be a heavy lift because I could just pick and choose where my hours were. That’s, of course, a luxury, but it is something that I turned the ship in that direction in an attempt to get here.
Beverly Hallberg:
Now, I know with a young child, sleep is all over the place, but do you have a certain schedule, or is every day a little bit different? How do you manage having a planned day versus just rolling with it?
Mary Katharine Ham:
So I am probably often too much a just roll with it person. But with a baby, obviously, things can be unpredictable. She’s not even on a schedule yet because she’s just out of newborn stage. So, we kind of roll with it. My husband can be a little bit flexible as well. He’s got some decent paternity leave, which is nice. So he can help me out on days when I’m really busy. Obviously, being clear for something where you need good audio, like a podcast or a TV hit.
Beverly Hallberg:
At some point. Yes.
Mary Katharine Ham:
I always make sure that there’s somebody on base to have the baby during those times. But outside of that, I try to handle her. I try to do my writing work when she’s sleeping or when she’s playing near me because she’s pretty chill. But we are getting a fair amount of sleep. I cannot complain about that. All three of my children have been nice to me when it comes to sleeping. So I keep waiting to get a hard baby and I haven’t yet.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah, the sleep has to be a game-changer. Although, you are open about the fact that when you’re pregnant, it’s not your favorite time, that you get really sick during pregnancies at your entire pregnancy. And how do you handle things then? I know, I’m sure there’s some women listening who could relate to that.
Mary Katharine Ham:
Yeah. So I have a thing called hyperemesis gravidarum. I’ve had it with all three pregnancies. The second one was not nearly as hard as the other two. This one was the hardest. It’s the Kate Middleton sickness. Of all the things I could have in common with Kate Middleton, the Lord decided that it was throwing up. So, you’re just very, very sick. It’s very severe morning sickness for sometimes the entirety of the pregnancy. For this one, it lasted pretty much the whole time. Lightened up around 30 weeks. So I always have so much fun with a newborn partly because once the pregnancy is over, I have this beautiful baby. I don’t care how sleepy I am because I can eat and stand up and do things that I haven’t been doing for months. So just the idea that I can enjoy a day and go to the gym and eat normally.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah.
Mary Katharine Ham:
If I haven’t gotten any sleep, I’m fine.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah. That makes sense. And just with this, times that you do have to take more time off, for example, when you have maternity leave, when you’re sick during pregnancy, all those things, have you ever felt that fear of, “Well, my career isn’t moving as fast as I want it to because I’m doing these things,” or how do you even emotionally manage the fact that there are going to be timeouts in how you handle work and your trajectory in your career?
Mary Katharine Ham:
I definitely feel it, and I think about it particularly in TV. I think you have…. Can we be frank? As women, we have a clock on us, right? There’s only so many years that I’m going to be fit for this career. If you look at the pattern in the industry, that may change in the industry, and it changes for different people, right, depending on what you’re bringing to the table. So I do think about that, but I also think that the true work of my life is raising these children.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah.
Mary Katharine Ham:
I try to stay in the game a little bit. But you know what? If I lose a step, I lose a step. And I don’t think that makes me any less dedicated or fulfilled if I accept that that’s part of the tradeoff that I’m making here. And I’ve worked with good people who try to get me back in the mix after I’ve had a baby and give me some leeway while I’m pregnant. So I feel like I do the work after the baby comes, which is sometimes opposite of how other people do it, where they like to stay in the game until the second they have a baby. And I’m the other way around. I’m like, “I’m going to just hibernate for a while. And then after this baby comes, check in with me, because I’m going to be very active after that.”
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, it’s interesting. So there’s the biological clock women have as far as being able to have kids and then there’s the career clock. So especially with TV. So it’s two clocks we’re dealing with. A lot for women to think about. But I think you’ve been able to do something really effectively, which is always talk about personal experiences and talk about being a mom in the public square. And you’ve done this a lot during COVID. And you wrote an article in The Atlantic that was widely shared. I found it to be a very powerful piece. It’s called “Kids Shouldn’t Have to be Resilient,” and you say that everyday parents have the choice of fear or carrying on. I want you to first of all give us some background about fear and carrying on. I think that will help us lead into this article. You had a tragedy in your life, and you had to decide whether or not you were going to crawl in a hole and stay there forever.
Mary Katharine Ham:
Yeah.
Beverly Hallberg:
And try to decide whether or not you wanted to raise your children with fear.
Mary Katharine Ham:
Yeah. So I’ve written two pieces for The Atlantic. One at the beginning of the pandemic and then one as we’re sort of emerging from it, about this subject because I have some experience with what I call parenting in crisis. I had a two-year-old and was pregnant with my second baby when my first husband passed away in a bike accident. He was 34 years old, like I said, seven months pregnant. So that was quite a time for us. And from that experience, I had a ton of help, including from you. Thank you, Beverly, for your support and prayer and otherwise. But I had a lot of help and a lot of support.
But as the mom who had to deliver a baby, I mean, there was a lot on my plate here. I had to make decisions about what do I want my life to look like, and how much is this truly tragic turn of the page going to affect me for the rest of my life? How will it affect me and my children for the rest of my life? And I made some decisions and cultivated some behaviors that helped me just put one foot in front of the other. And it was very dark there for a while, but I also had this beautiful new beginning with a brand-new baby who was so nice to me. So that was very helpful.
Beverly Hallberg:
A blessing from God.
Mary Katharine Ham:
… new beginning. But I advised those who were newly parenting in crisis, which was the beginning of the pandemic, to say, “Look, you don’t have to be the parent tomorrow that you were today.” In an instant, my whole parenting identity changed. I was a single mom expecting her second child. And you can change your behaviors within that situation to make your situation more empowering for you and better for your children. And that was one of the things I learned and sort of stumbled upon. I also talked to, for one of these pieces, a psychologist who works on bereaved families, works with bereaved families and divorcing families, and found that parenting and the way that parents decide to parent through those events has some of the most impact on their kids.
So on one hand, that’s scary because you’re in charge. But also, it’s amazing because you’re in charge of the outcomes for your children. So I implemented some traditions for my kids, things that gave them stability. We had hot breakfast together every morning. I asked my friends and family to hold me accountable for the idea that I didn’t want to shelter my kids so much because I was scared of life because this terrible thing had happened to us. And I also asked my friends and family, “Look, I know that right now we are a sad story, right? When we walk into a room, you think, ‘Oh gosh, sad trombone. It’s the pregnant widow with her daughter,’ right?”
Beverly Hallberg:
Right.
Mary Katharine Ham:
But I wanted people not to see us that way. Like, “I know we look like a Lifetime movie, but I would like to aspire to a Hallmark movie, so let’s see if your attitudes can help me change that.” And I think saying those things out loud, I don’t want to live afraid, and I don’t want to be the sad trombone, they shaped our lives. And the fact that I asked people to help me live that way shaped our lives. And so, I thought it was my job to shield my children as much as possible. And I think during the pandemic, a lot of people unfortunately threw up their hands and in fact put a lot on their kids. A lot of the anxiety, a lot of the duty of masking, of taking all of their touchpoints away from them, all of their support structures away from them, as a society and as parents individually. And I think it hurt a lot of kids. And we shouldn’t ask them to be resilient for adults when it’s not absolutely necessary that they do so.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah.
Mary Katharine Ham:
That’s what it came down to.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so, two-part question on this. So do you think, first of all, that you were able to be more resilient? Because you were resilient; you were speaking about this I think within a week of your first husband passing away on national TV in front of audiences. Were you more resilient because you were doing it for your kids? Is that first of all true? And second of all, when you say shielding your kids, how do you feel like you shielded them? I know one of your daughters, you were still pregnant with her, but you had another toddler who’s old enough to remember her dad. How do you shield but remember the memory? What is that balance?
Mary Katharine Ham:
Yeah, I think I tried to focus on… Well first, yes, I think it was easier because I had kids. Now, through my experience, I know many widows, many of whom did not have kids and they were similarly resilient and had similar issues that I did, right? But to me, especially being pregnant meant that there was a natural break on, for instance, going to the bottle to solve your problems.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah.
Mary Katharine Ham:
I had a limiting factor here that was like, “You got to take care of yourself. You have to eat food. You have to get out and walk around.” And so I think that helped keep me very healthy. Striving for something a little more healthy than sometimes deep grief can look like. And then, as far as shielding them, I don’t mean that they didn’t know that something terrible was happening or that I moved on without talking about their dad. I did try to. I talked to a psychologist or a therapist about how to keep memories alive. If my two-year-old could preserve any, how could we do that? And she said, “Okay, well, you need to reinforce those memories.” And it was really hard for me to talk about that with her, but I did it because I thought it was important that she get a chance at that, right? I’m the adult.
There’s a great line in Station Eleven. I don’t know if you’ve seen this post-apocalyptic series based on a book. It’s on HBO Max. It’s about a flu taking over the world. And there’s two brothers who end up taking care of a nine-year-old child because that’s what happens in the apocalypse, right? These strangers end up together and they say, “Well, what are we going to do with this kid?” And one of the brothers says to the other brother, “We’re adults, we’re going to act like we’re not scared.” And that’s what I did. I tried to pray through it. I tried to get as much support as I could. And then I tried to basically tough it out in some respects and make sure that I was putting on a face that was supportive, not detached, but brave for my kids.
Beverly Hallberg:
Right. And so let’s talk about just this idea of being resilient during COVID because that seems like what many asked children to do. So we want to keep adults healthy at the expense of children and their learning disabilities or their development disabilities that are likely to happen because of this is really just the switch I feel in our society. Instead of saying, “We’re the adults, we need to take care of children,” we were saying, “We’re the adults; children, you need to help us stay safe.”
Mary Katharine Ham:
Yes.
Beverly Hallberg:
And this is just this weird switch. How did this happen, and what would you say about what we’ve done to kids? What have been the impacts?
Mary Katharine Ham:
Yeah. So I think the glaring result is the closing of schools in major metro areas. This was counter to basically all the available science. I mean, Europe was going back unmasked in some places — Denmark, I think, within several weeks of the pandemic. Now look, I forgive people in the early days, right? April and May, even into the end of the school year, that year. Fine. We’re not sure what we’re dealing with. We don’t know how it affects children. By June, we certainly knew. By July, we had quite a bit of data from Europe, and I assumed naively that our school system would just work during the summer to get these kids back in school. And that’s what a bunch of moms believed all over the country. And then it turned out by mid-summer they hadn’t done anything. They hadn’t made plans, they hadn’t thought through how this was going to happen. And I live in a major gigantic, resource-rich, renowned school system. So I was like, “Oh, they’ll figure this out.” They were not figuring this out.
And I think it’s partly political. It was partly that Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump said the kids could go back to school. So the American Association of Pediatrics and other teachers’ associations that had formerly said it was important for them to go back to school decided, “Oh, we don’t want to be on the same side as Donald Trump.” That was some of it. It’s just plain and simple. And that is tragic because that’s a political decision.
Beverly Hallberg:
Right.
Mary Katharine Ham:
I think some of it was fear of liability that, “Oh, it’s the better thing to be more careful.” But more careful does not actually mean better health outcomes because, as we’ve seen, when kids miss these giant milestones, when they miss entire years of school — let’s not even talk about the mental health part — just the learning loss is going to take a decade to get back if you get it back at all. And that seemed very dangerous to me from the beginning of the school year in 2020-21. I just thought, “What are we doing here?”
Beverly Hallberg:
Right.
Mary Katharine Ham:
They’re the least at-risk population, let’s put the least at-risk teachers with them. Let more at-risk students and at-risk teachers be online and do what we can do. Maybe put some classrooms outdoors. There was no leadership. There was no creative thinking. Meanwhile, half a block down the road or half a mile down the road, you have a private school open and operating just fine. And that happened all over the country. It was very disillusioning for many parents, which is why I think you saw a Republican win the governor’s race in Virginia unexpectedly. And I think you’ll continue to see very activated parents in ways that you didn’t before, because they had a very expensive public good that they had come to rely on completely taken away. And then — this is the icing on the cake — and then told not to complain about it.
Beverly Hallberg:
And how dare you complain if you do?
Mary Katharine Ham:
Right. Complaining made you a wannabe child sacrificer or a dangerous person or, in the words of one DOJ letter, a possible domestic terrorist. That was the messaging, and children were hurt really bad, and parents were right to fight for them.
Beverly Hallberg:
I wondered of the psychological impact of a child being so afraid not to wear a mask, especially when, for the vast majority of children, the risk is so small. I understand somebody with underlying conditions, I understand people who are elderly. There are people who obviously should be very concerned about COVID. But for the vast majority of children, this is not an issue. What have we done psychologically as far as just their approach to life, fearful of life, of people?
Mary Katharine Ham:
This worries me, and I think you see a lot of this with child psychologists. I mean, they’re booked up for ages. I mean, this is anecdotal but also a pretty common knowledge that these resources are very tapped into right now and busy because so many kids are dealing with these issues. Understandably, they’ve been living in a world where they’ve been told they’re in grave danger, and the schools closing fed that idea, right?
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah.
Mary Katharine Ham:
Like, “Oh, well, it must be a big deal if the schools are closed.” And it is a big deal. Just not for young people populations, right? So it concerns me a lot because overcoming something like this… And, by the way, this is a bit of a media problem, which is that media incentivizes dramatizing as much of this as possible.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah.
Mary Katharine Ham:
And so you get a lot of stories from parents who are really scared for their young kids. And I want to say this as kindly as possible because yelling people out of their anxiety will not work. But I guarantee you, if you have an otherwise healthy child and you are living and parenting in crisis like you were in 2020, you are overestimating the risk to your child.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yes.
Mary Katharine Ham:
And the risk actually might be putting your fears on that child. And that might end up being the worst result as opposed to COVID. We did not deal with those tradeoffs, and it’s going to have real bad effects.
Beverly Hallberg:
One of the things that’s been fascinating for me — because I moved out of the DC area to South Carolina a year and a half ago, so got to see how… And I’m still back in DC all the time. I get to see how people have lived and to really see the difference of a lockdown society. Kids aren’t going to school, masking all the time, versus a freer society like South Carolina, the kids are living in completely different ways. And also reminded me of what you wrote about in one of your articles, The Daily Beast, “The True Cost of Masking Young Kids Forever.” And you outlined in here the countries in Europe and how they’ve handled masking children and schooling children. The United States, especially in the really blue, urban, large cities, have treated this differently in reference to children than the vast majority of the world, correct?
Mary Katharine Ham:
Yes. So the World Health Organization recommends — I can’t remember what the starting age is, but it’s much older. The UK, except for occasionally when they were in a big spike — they would bring down the numbers a little bit — but I think it was like 9 to 11 they started masking. A lot of schools just never masked at all in Europe and the UK. And the two-year-old masking thing is unique to this country. And no one can figure out where it came from. I have tried to figure out where it came from. I have asked the CDC what’s the data behind the two-year-olds, because no one else does this. The World Health Organization does not suggest this, the CDC of Europe does not suggest this. Most Europeans would look at you like you’re insane if you say that you need to mask your toddler. And there’s no answer. I have gotten no answer. No one knows what the data is behind this.
And they don’t want to answer that question. And yet here we are just continuing, especially in New York right now, just making sure that the only people masked are toddlers. And this betrays an ignorance of the data because they are safer from infection and bad outcomes than vaccinated adults. That is just a fact. And yet we treat them like disease vectors. And I have to think that there will be long-term consequences for children who are treated as if they are a pestilence, which is, even if we’re doing other things that are positive, that’s a message that they don’t need to hear. And it truly is not necessary.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so I think lessons that are good for children include like grit, overcoming hardship, how to persevere. Perseverance is important. This idea that they’ll just be resilient and bounce back, what do you think we’re going to see when we’re going to be unfolding what this has all meant for years to come? How bad do you think it’s going to be when we look back at what we did to the kids and their outcomes because of it?
Mary Katharine Ham:
This is the thing, too, is I’m in favor of all those things, right? When my kids encounter hardship, I don’t — they call it bulldozer parenting or snowplow parenting, where you clear the way for your kid. I don’t do that for them. I want them to be able to overcome obstacles. But this idea that we should put obstacles in front of them when it’s not necessary is not a healthy thing to do, right? They’re going to encounter things, but we don’t need to cover half their faces for half their lives just to see how much they can deal with, right? And what’s more frustrating sometimes is the gaslighting about these ideas, right?
Look, guys. When my school district attempted to go to full Zoom school and tell my six-year-old that she should be on a screen for six hours a day, I remembered that for the past 10 years, people have told me that being on screens for children for several hours a day is probably not a great idea. So I was like, “You know what? I’m going to pass on that. We’re going to homeschool.” And it turns out that indeed, yes, screens for six hours a day for children is not a great idea and has really bad outcomes. We knew that, but they’re retrofitting everything to serve the pandemic rules. And that was a mistake. They should have been upfront with people, and they should have been more careful with kids because we don’t have to put trauma on them if we don’t need to.
Beverly Hallberg:
Right. Yeah. And so I so appreciate the articles that you’ve written on this. Before you go, just one final question for you. You were talking earlier just about being a single mom during your life of being in crisis. I know that there are other single moms out there for a variety of reasons or single moms. What encouragement do you give to them? What did you tell yourself? What did others encourage you in on being a single mom during a hard time?
Mary Katharine Ham:
So a couple things. One, I was thinking back about it recently ‘cause, especially with this baby, I’ve had more support because I’ve had my husband here. I was remarried in 2020. And I was thinking about traveling with my little kids, the two of them by myself. And I used to do it all the time. And thought, “My God, what was I thinking? How did I do that?” Speaking of grit, practice doesn’t make you perfect, when you’re on your own with kids, but it does make you braver. And so I pushed myself. I really did because I didn’t want them to miss out on things. I tried to give myself grace where I needed it, because I really couldn’t handle a normal workweek in the way that a normal person would with a schedule. I couldn’t do that. I tapped as many resources as I could. I did learn to ask for help when I was on my own, which is not something I was great at before.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah.
Mary Katharine Ham:
And people wanted to help me. And so, when I needed sitters or what have you, sometimes just friends would come over and watch the girls for a bit so I could have a break. But there is beauty in the idea, like I said, that when you’re the parent, setting boundaries for your kids, creating traditions, having a rich home life, that can all happen on your own. And it happened for us in a really beautiful way. And that that can dictate how your kids turn out. You have a beautiful gift in being in charge of that, and you take that gift, and you pray for strength to make it happen.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah, absolutely. And I want to thank you not only for joining us today, but also just through what you’ve been through. I think you’ve always been such a transparent person and willing to talk about the highs and the lows. And I know it helps so many people to just see how you’ve gone on. So many people have been rooting for you and your family and excited to see where you are today with your third child, married, and a new dog. Lots of wonderful things in your life. And thank you for talking so much about the pandemic and children as well. Mary Katharine Ham, thank you for joining She Thinks.
Mary Katharine Ham:
Thank you so much. And thank you to anybody out there who prayed for us and helped us along the way. We really appreciate it.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you all for joining us. Before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you. An investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. So please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That is iwf.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or review; it does help. And we’d love it if you shared this episode so your friends know where they can find more of She Thinks. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for watching.