Being stuck at home with the kids is hard. So is sending them back into the world.

It’s easy for these sorts of worries to spread between parents and children, says Jerry Bubrick, a senior psychologist in the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute.

“The core feature of anxiety is difficulty tolerating uncertainty,” he says. “And there is a lot of uncertainty right now. But our job as parents is not to give kids the answers. Our job is to help them tolerate not knowing. So we have to tolerate not knowing.”