MIAMI — The door of Carlota’s room is ajar, so I peek inside to see what she’s doing. She’s sitting upright at her desk with her laptop in front of her. On the screen are a dozen of her schoolmates, all of them, like Carlota, participating in a virtual class. I can tell that their teacher is leading the lesson from her home — I’m pretty sure they’re discussing fractions and decimals — but Carlota and her friends are following closely along as if she were talking to them in person.

Everything seems normal. And yet nothing is.

I live in the same house as Carlota, a wonderful, loving and brilliant 9-year-old girl, and the daughter of Chiquinquirá Delgado, my partner. Carlota brought happiness into my life from the moment I met her, just a few months after her birth, and I couldn’t imagine this house without her in it. “Good morning everyone!” she shouts from her bedroom when she wakes up. Her tireless energy — she loves to create dance moves — and curiosity has made the tedium of quarantine a bit easier to endure.

Carlota — like the roughly half of the world’s population living in coronavirus-induced lockdown — has been stuck at home for several weeks now, and there are times when her sadness and frustration rise to the surface. Like when she wonders, with tears in her eyes, if we’ll still be able to throw her a birthday party in May. Or when she wants to get together with her friends and doesn’t quite understand why they can’t come over. One of our biggest achievements as parents during the crisis was taking Carlota on a short bike ride with one of her friends. The kids enjoyed it, but saying goodbye without touching was really hard for them.

The truth, however, is that Carlota’s generation — there are an estimated 74 million children under 17 in the United States — is much better prepared than ours to face months of isolation. These young people have been unintentionally training for this moment all their lives. From a very young age, they’ve been communicating with one another using devices that never existed in my time. So when we told them they couldn’t leave the house, all they did was enter “virtual mode.”