Aibu to think that a lot of kids are extremely anxious after lockdown?

[MrsHookey]

I've got one child who seems extremely anxious since lockdown. Anecdotally it seems like a few kids I know are like this. Is this a wider thing? Are mumsnetters finding their children have become anxious since March 2020?

Sad as in a shame that is

Discussion around impact on children has been shut down a lot

I may be shot for saying this, but anecdotally when it comes to younger DCs the anxious ones also have quite Covid-anxious parents

So you're basically implying that all the posters in this thread with depressed or suicidal children have caused it themselves by being too anxious? That all they had to do was turn off the TV, take their children to shops/playgroups and tell them not to wash their hands more than the usual amount in order for them to turn out just fine.

People like you, and the person you quoted, were incredibly lucky because you were protected by a majority who did exactly what was asked of them (the "covid anxious"). Many families sacrificed their own well-being and those of their children to follow lockdown rules which collectively broke the chain of transmission to allow for periods of normality.

If everyone decided to sod it and stop using hand sanitiser then this whole situation would probably drag out 2 years longer than it should.

My 6yo has been less anxious. I think more time at home and lots free time last summer was actually really good for him. Really made me look at how we structure family time.

I imagine if he'd been older it may have been different, though my mental health was actually also better during lockdown.

Butter :

"If everyone decided to sod it and stop using hand sanitiser then this whole situation would probably drag out 2 years longer than it should."

That is well OTT and a bit nasty. And rubbish aswell. We obeyed all the rules, but I didn't wipe down my shopping with detol and not a fan of hand sanitizer myself. But I can't see how any of my actions have prolonged anything!

Ds was very anxious during the 1st lockdown because his life changed overnight and he didn't understand why. He couldn't go to all the places he had been going to for years and he couldn't see all his familiar people. Fortunately he was still able to go to special school although it wasn't as it usually was.
It definitely wasn't us making him anxious as he doesn't even know what covid is. There was a big increase in self injurious and aggressive behaviour with constant repetitive behaviour in between the meltdowns.
During the later lockdowns we decided to do our own thing and make our own judgement about what was safe as we were not putting him through that again.

My teen is! It's been so hard on them!

This thread is beginning to make me feel bad now. BTW DD is not anxious about actually getting covid. Many of her friends have already had it. She is anxious because the pandemic totally destroyed her best years of education, one time only experiences, internships she had worked for and friendships. Many of her friends are the same.

I don't think it's anything I or their parents did.

Ds19 is fine, he’s away at Uni and even in lockdown was having parties and being as normal as possible

Ds16 is also fine, possibly because we always talked about how unhealthy, wrong and unethical it was to lockdown children.

We only complied with the rules to the absolute bare minimum.

He never ever thought it was normal to do what we did. Ffs we cordoned off playgrounds. Wtf were people thinking?!!

I may be shot for saying this, but anecdotally when it comes to younger DCs the anxious ones also have quite Covid-anxious parents

Nope, not in our case. As I said upthread, I made clear to DD from the start that she was not at risk. I was (and am) extremely relaxed about my personal risk from covid so I didn’t pass any covid-anxiety on to her. She was miserable and anxious because her life as she knew it disappeared overnight, she couldn’t go to school, and any socialising (literally ANY socialising, as she is an only child) became illegal. I will not accept that this is my fault. It is the fault of lockdowns.

I think identifying it as “lockdowns” as the problem doesn’t give the full story and leads to the (fairly pointless IMHO) discussion about lockdowns vs in school whatever. But aside from that caveat, the pandemic and effect on schooling has definitely had an effect on my 16 yo DS. Not about the health risks of the pandemic but rather the effects to his motivation, confidence and ability to be ‘seen’ and supported. We’re in a big old mess because of it. Might’ve happened without the pandemic, but the pandemic certainly hasn’t help. Don’t blame teachers, don’t blame government (blame myself cos Obvs!) but “it is what it is” and just have to find a way through.

@TurnUpTurnip

www.traumainformedschools.co.uk/webinars/is-resilience-the-best-narrative-for-mental-health-in-schools-right-now-2

This is a real good webinar about kids and resilience and covid

Just reading some of earlier posts….

2 (child) + 2 (intervention) = 4 (outcome) (for good parents, but also lucky parents who were ‘in the same sea but not the same boat’)

Sometimes it’s 2 + 2 = aardvark no matter what you’ve done because of xyz

My 7yo suffered loads, she found the disconnect from school in Lockdown 1 hard, the weekly phone calls and occasionally video and voice messages just didn't cut for her, her dad cut her off for the entire thing too so for part of it it was just me and her.

She then had an operation just before the 2nd lot of school closues so was off school 2 months before they closed. Then we had to completely disconnect from school apart from photos and typed messages, she was one of only 5 in her class of 30 that wasn't in school on a keyworker place and she got upset seeing the videos and zoom calls with all her friends sat together and she couldn't join in.

She's had lots of friendship issues since going back, is very clingy at contact handover, struggles to go into school. And I've been told will not qualify for any kind of help because she's not bad enough. It feels very unfair that some of her friends are where they should be academically and socially (I don't begrudge them that at all their parents were offered places due to their circumstances and they rightly took that place) and DD feels a bit left behind and left out. We've had issues with bullying as well because the children who were in during lockdown feel like an exclusive group and now exclude DD (and others who weren;t there in lockdown).

Sorry I'm ranting, it feels so unfair. And I'm worried for the future of these children who've basically been left to manage with no extra help (and this isn't against her wonderful teachers either who have and continue to try their absolute best with very little outside support).

I work in a primary school in an incredibly deprived area and to be fair it's not hugely worse than normal. I imagine teens will have been hit way harder though

My DD's don't appear to be traumatised by it.

@bookworm14

I may be shot for saying this, but anecdotally when it comes to younger DCs the anxious ones also have quite Covid-anxious parents

Nope, not in our case. As I said upthread, I made clear to DD from the start that she was not at risk. I was (and am) extremely relaxed about my personal risk from covid so I didn’t pass any covid-anxiety on to her. She was miserable and anxious because her life as she knew it disappeared overnight, she couldn’t go to school, and any socialising (literally ANY socialising, as she is an only child) became illegal. I will not accept that this is my fault. It is the fault of lockdowns.

I remember your threads - think you and I were both roasted for raising concerns about what it was doing to our kids quite early on.

DD2 lost half her fucking speech and would walk into rooms and just burst into tears and couldn't sleep because of "too much sad in her brain". She was scared of anything floating in the air (like dust particles) and refused to leave the house for a while. I rang and emailed everywhere I could to try to get some help but no fucker was interested - until the class teacher rang to speak to her on the phone and heard how badly her language had suffered and got her back into school. On here - the ones now feigning concern and judging... "it's a good opportunity for her to learn some resilience".

Oh yeah and she developed - at the start of it all when school went a bit bonkers on the hand washing front and no one knew what they were doing, anxiety headaches so bad she was losing half her vision when they hit. They faded as we managed to get her worries under control - but she didn't pick them up from me - I explained from the outset that they were minimal risk and it was being kind to protect others and giving space to be polite - she picked it up in school. Then the teacher she had the following year who blatantly (she was running her mouth off on Twitter about it) thought the schools should never be reopen had so many covid rules that her anxiety just spiralled about trying to keep them all and she ended up in a right state, selectively mute in class and again, it's taken a LOT for us to untangle the damage on that one.

My eldest came out of it better - bloody angry at losing huge chunks of her life - but angry in a "wanting to start her own political party and become PM" way at least.

It's a huge thing for any little person to get their heads around that they can go to bed one night and things are pretty OK - and then in the morning they find out their schools are closed (happened here with the Jan lockdowns as the day before had been an INSET) or that everything they hooked their life onto in terms of their routines has been taken away and they can't see their friends and someone's padlocked the swings up. I'd be more worried by kids who weren't affected in some way by that - even just in terms of needing time to process it. And now, even private services are fucking swamped around here as parents are desperately trying to pay for things like private SALT as the NHS services have keeled over completely - even privately you're looking at waiting lists getting on for 6 months just to get an assessment done.

I remember the level of ridicule for suggesting a digital life was no substitute for a 16 year old. That he needed peers and not just online chat / class and so on

Some were really bad at taking anything like this on board and made sure it was hounded off.

Oh yes and let's throw in a friend's now-7 year old who has developed really bad contamination OCD to the point they can't have water trays in school as she'll just stand and wash her hands all day every day - she thinks school closed because "she didn't wash her hands enough". Her hands are now usually red and bleeding as she tries desperately to do "her bit" to keep the schools open again.

And the kids I worked with on the ASD spectrum who have developed similar issues... or the ones with interests in things like military history who were left spending months online to google up "Nazis" on the internet - and the rabbit holes THAT led down. The school based police officer saying he was getting called out to more and more incidents of physical fights stemming from "online banter" during the lockdowns where something's been said, taken the wrong way and allowed to fester until they get back together face-to-face and something sparks it right off.

I think young people have really suffered due to the lockdowns - I feel that they were totally ignored during the pandemic. We now have a a generation of children and young children who have really suffered in terms of isolation - the emphasis upon on the care homes and elderly and vulnerable has created a new vulnerable group. Children and young people have had their life , education, emotional, physical and mental health damaged and yet continually we are still hearing that we need to prioritise the elderly

@Blueeyedgirl21
"@ XelaM that’s a brilliant idea. Did you never get stopped/ questioned about traveling to and from? I would have just done it regardless I think but the covid threads on here were slating people for leaving their house with kids to kick a ball around on a field a 3 minute drive away, and that’s not an exaggeration!"

Because you were allowed to exercise, if we ever got stopped (which thankfully we didn't) we would have said it's for the "daily exercise". We live quite close to the yard, so it wasn't long travel for us and obviously everything was in the fresh air.

I absolutely hated the police state Uk was turning into (especially when police are so reluctant to deal with actual crime!). My dad's car was stolen from outside our house and they wouldn't even send anyone out despite there being CCTV on the road. But of course policing parks to stop kids from playing ball - several police officers were out to get them!

@ButterBiscuitBase

I may be shot for saying this, but anecdotally when it comes to younger DCs the anxious ones also have quite Covid-anxious parents

So you're basically implying that all the posters in this thread with depressed or suicidal children have caused it themselves by being too anxious? That all they had to do was turn off the TV, take their children to shops/playgroups and tell them not to wash their hands more than the usual amount in order for them to turn out just fine.

People like you, and the person you quoted, were incredibly lucky because you were protected by a majority who did exactly what was asked of them (the "covid anxious"). Many families sacrificed their own well-being and those of their children to follow lockdown rules which collectively broke the chain of transmission to allow for periods of normality.

If everyone decided to sod it and stop using hand sanitiser then this whole situation would probably drag out 2 years longer than it should.

Firstly I stressed "anecdotally" - ie this is my personal experience of people I know. This entire thread, and AIBU generally, is anecdotal. Sorry my particular 'anecdotal' upsets you, but there you go.

Secondly we were actually almost entirely observant of the actual rules (not the made-up-by-my-cousin's-girlfriend's-granny-on-Facebook rules), even the bloody idiotic ones (shut playgrounds, going to the beach was tantamount to killing granny).

Thirdly, you did not 'protect' me or mine. I have never asked anyone to 'protect' me or my household from Covid, an illness that posed an extremely finite risk to us statistically, even pre-vaccination. I never wanted lockdowns personally - they might have left the kids unscathed, but my MH was so fucked up I ended in A & E on diazapram one memorable night & only managed to hide that from the DC because DH was a fucking legend for 18 months. So jog on.

This thread is proof that you should be mindful about what you post in AIBU. If you don't want to hear or read the counterpoint to your argument, then phrase the question in a different way and post it somewhere more appropriate.

Posters whose dc haven't been badly affected by lockdowns are not being contrary, mean or unfeeling. They are just saying how it was for them.

Those same posters may have plenty of experience with mental health problems themselves or in their family, perhaps even in their children ... just not as a result of lockdown. So don't say "fuck them" to them. They could just be answering the question honestly insofar as it applies to them/their family.

Oh and the whole hand sanitiser thing is pointless health theatre vis-a-vis an airborne virus & Covid will actually drag on forever in some form because the measures needed to sustain low transmission rates indefinitely are actually pretty repressive and will prove socially / economically / politically unsustainable in the medium to long-term. Masks & hand sanitiser aren't going to cut it any winter soon, as continental Europe is currently discovering.

Mine is less anxious.