Children thinking lockdown lasted years 😢

[Mayflower282]

Was talking with my kids about Covid (they were in primary school when it started, now in high school), they asked how long lockdown lasted and I couldn’t actually remember, but I said around 6 months…they were shocked and said they thought it was 2-3 years. I guess their perception of time at that age it felt longer. Felt so sad hearing this 😢

Anyone else had similar from their kids?

Oh Jesus the doors, WTF was she thinking?

How does someone who thinks we should all have multiple smoke detectors in tiny houses think cutting fire doors is a good idea.

Remember covid could tell the time?
Awfy clever that virus, out to lunch was safe but dinner was too dangerous.

So many rules in restaurants and pubs were stupid. The booking tables for an hour or whatever essentially encouraged pub crawls.

Nobody will follow rules if they tried it again

What sports facility did we lose?

Edit i don't doubt you, I just don't remember

They are right! It went on for ages, not continuously but lockdown, eat out to help out, groups of 6, tiers, schools closed again, masks, isolating whole classes, testing, covid passes. Ds missed half of Y9 in the first lockdown, then half of Y10 for another lockdown and 5 episodes of isolation due to being a contact and then 2 weeks off when he actually had covid in Y11 despite having no symptoms at all.

@Mayflower282 your children are right

It was a very carefully staged nightmare for 2 years.

It sounds as if you don't remember it, given that you're not posting in a fury, I hope that's not because you were too upset to remember. Because it fucking ruined my life. And a lot of other lives. In 2026 I still cannot believe the damage. Although I managed not to think about it last year. Which is a good start.

Anyway, I think the "living with it" plan was published in February 2022. We didn't get rid of masks until then did we?

And when the legislation was initially put in place, it ran for two years. That was the thing that really scared me about it. And I was right to be scared. I'm going to assume that your children weren't looking at the law though 😂

Two years out of your children's lives must seem enormous to them - it seems enormous to me!

I have one contact whose child was scared to go out after she was allowed - she was three when it all began. They live in Spain. I think things eased up more for them earlier, but I wasn't really keeping up.

I don't know what happened with Nicola Sturgeon and the doors by the way. What's that about?

Oof maybe I blanked it all out then, I suppose I was just talking about the severe “stay at home” extreme lockdowns, which I think were a few months each time. Maybe my kids were talking about the whole saga.

yeah I found it incredibly distressing. My mum died during the lockdowns because there were no GP appts, if she had managed to get help earlier on she might still be alive.

Same, I’m not in Scotland and this passed me by, what was it all about?!

Where I am the children of key workers were allowed to attend school for the summer term of 2020, everyone came back in the autumn term (September to Christmas) and then keyworker children only again from Jan to the first half term and then it was everyone again from then onwards. The definition of a keyworker had changed this time around so we had a lot more children in.

So essentially the children of non key workers missed one a half terms of being in a classroom although it spanned 2 school years. We arranged online school for I think around 4 hours a day, the teacher and classroom assistant switched between being in the physical classroom with the keyworker children and then doing the online schooling (2 hours in the morning and 2 in the afternoon). It was a weird time but we really did try our best to work to the ever changing guidelines.

Why the tear? It is just perception of time. Think of when 6 weeks holiday felt like forever. It’s just how children perceive things.

Plus if they are used to hearing adults talking about before/ during/after COVID it has probably cemented in their minds that it went on longer

It was just a year in England.

No school from March 20 to sept 20. Then they went back until Xmas, while idiot Johnson let the pubs rev the virus up again. Then they were off from Jan 20 to march 20. Mine were tweens.

I had a chat with my 10 year old about his early childhood memories and he said he could recall me being away for weeks on end. I never went away on any overnight stays until he was 9 years old. The longest I was out was 9 hours at work. It broke my heart that he felt that it was always such a long time. To someone that young it is an eternity.

Nicola Sturgeon decided that cutting a bit off the bottom of doors in schools would help 🙈

Def over a year as dd birthday is end of March and we had to cancel her 3rd and 4th birthday parties

I think things like this are actually really important for people to know. I honestly think too many people these days think you need to believe everything a child (or adult) says about their childhood as 100% true. Whenever any one on here complains about things their parents did or if a woman is saying their adult child is very upset over their childhood people always say well it must be true and it was the parents in the wrong. Child (and adult) memories can be very different to what actually happened. It doesn’t mean the person doesn’t believe it to be true. But it also doesn’t mean those things happened.

That passed me by! The classroom I taught in didn’t have a fire door, the fire doors were in all the corridors but the classroom doors weren’t fire ones.

How did you come up with ‘about 6 months’ OP??? That would mean that lockdown ended in September 2020…surely you can remember the awfulness of the continuous lockdowns?? The worst of them being from January 2021, which was when the whole thing ramped up exponentially?? I was teaching Year 2 at the time, and I had two different cohorts during the pandemic…the second cohort had a seriously bad deal with our ‘bubble’ popping every few weeks…we spent more time at home after a ‘bubble burst’ than we did in school (after we eventually went back to school of course!)

It was a grim time…but also…Google is your friend here! It’s easy enough to type in ‘how long did Covid lockdowns last in the UK?’

January 2021…not 2020.

DD remembers having a little party with grandparents a few days before her birthday... going swimming, Beavers, schoool etc, planning her proper party. Normal 6 yo.

Then turning 7 in a completely changed world.

She got her Dinosaur Science party for her 9th birthday!

On and off, with full and partial lockdowns/ restrictions it did last years though

Schools were closed on and off for ages, for children that was a significant portion of their lives to date. One of mine missed most of year six and had a disrupted start to year seven. My other one was half way through secondary school so missed year 8 and some of year 9.

I work with 0-5’s and the cohorts following the lockdowns were very different in behaviour to the cohorts before them. I’d say we are having typical cohorts again now but it has taken about 3 years.

The doors thing - there was concern about ack of air circulation in classrooms and children (despite children in secondary wearing masks from August 2020 to February 2022) and it being Scotland, opening windows wide isn't always an option. Doors propped open not great for noise.

So some numpty in the Scottish government came up with the idea of cutting 6 inches off the bottom of all the fire doors to allow air to circulate. Rather than saying what a load of nonsense and come up with an idea which is not stupid and not a fire risk, Sturgeon defended whoever came up with the idea.

The vertical drinking was some sort of rule about how you could sit at a table and have a drink but not stand at a bar. And don't let's forget that she allowed pubs to open but not to sell ant alcohol, and no music in restaurants or bars either. Mad times. Glad she's gone.

There were still restrictions into 2022- at least in the sector I work in. There were all those local lockdowns/tiers etc as well.

mar 20 - jul 20 off school
sept 20 back but whole classes off if test positive
oct or nov mini lockdown not affecting schools
jan 21 - mar (?) 21 off school.

my kid was y3 so missed into y4 transition. Into y5 our school also had huge outbreak so no transition. That was july 2021.

but.. legal self isolation stopped feb 2022.

My 11 yo now has ocd from all the hand washing…

It was forever here in Oldham. We stayed on lockdown far longer than everywhere else (apart from Leicester).
My mum was gadding about going on holiday past us on the motorway.

Hope to God you're right but the puritans were loving it