Kids still feeling the effects of lockdowns…

[sloanedanger]

I just got caught reading a really interesting thread on Twitter started by a teacher:

“Is anyone else thinking we are starting to see the impact of 2 years of disruption and time at home, due to COVID 19, in schools? Extreme behaviours? Some pupils very emotional and struggling to regulate? Low attendance compared to normal? Winter bugs hitting hard?”

A lot of the comments say Y3 is the worst, others saying Years 7 and 8.

My DS is in Year 2 and often struggles with emotions and self regulation at school. It’s made me think, perhaps there’s a reason why linked to the pandemic. Lockdown was hard, DP and I were home with very young DC, trying to work, poor mental health, emotions high. Very little patience.

This is useful to know, thankyou.

I hope that anyone who has been affected and whose children were affected will be filling in the public enquiry.

I'd forgotten about so much, while trying to get in with things now, but lessons need to be learned from all of this by the lawmakers... Unless they want to use it as a user manual for how to wreck children's lives if there's a next time.

Worth pointing out here that some people have much more reason to be afraid of police than others. And there are numerous instances of them going for the easier targets.

Well, I wouldn't be too happy if my so called friends suggested I was either entirely ignorant( or maybe just lazy) and let my kid sit on screens all day just for the sake of it. Maybe your friends are different.

Nice you had all those opportunities. Nice you had family nearby to share the load. Nice you had the spare time and money to take your DD on adventures. Nice you could bake and craft and had access to what you needed for that. Surely you can see though that not everyone would have had the same, and many people will have followed the rules/ law that you made the decision to flout.

It just comes across a bit smug to say "the reason my DD did so amazingly well vs everyone else is because I am so clever" when actually it probably mostly had to do with your circumstances (and, dare I say it, your privilege).

We stuck to the rules in lockdown 1 but in the second lockdown, we arranged to meet a friend with her child at the local park once a week. My kid is an only child - if we hadn't done that, she literally wouldn't have seen another child for 4 months. My view at the time, was anyone who thought it was appropriate to isolate a child from any sort of socialisation was an utter idiot.

I'm really not surprised that kids are now struggling. As a PP said, there was a huge understanding post-war of the trauma that people went through back in the 40s/50s, but we're expected to just 'get on with it' with no regard of how much of their lives the kids actually lost.

I don’t think we’ll ever get an acknowledgement that the response was overblown and genuinely frightening

people were championing lockdowns for months afterward
I still worry now that we’ll have lockdowns for climate justice” or “winter flu”
I feel like it actually scarred me tho maybe that’s me being overblown too

Yeah, there was a very clever campaign to minimise any loss because people were dying. It was as though no loss was valid because the loss of life trumped all. As if they were mutually exclusive. You still see it now - on the other thread about MH there were posters suggested MH impact shouldn't be discussed as people they knew died (or were CEV), and discussing other impliations of the lockdown somehow minimised the worthiness of the lockdown.

Let the public consultation know re damage, it’s better to be recorded so people are heard and it doesn’t happen again.

There’s a link further up, it’s really fast / easy and helped me feel I was adding to outcome.

I will definitely do that!

This thread is bringing back horrible memories! I found lockdown horrendous...and the thing is I'm fairly lucky. We have a biggish house, a garden. I am a sahm. Dh is a good man...I'm not in an abusive relationship. God knows how awful it must have been if you were stuck in a tower block, in an over crowded flat with a bloke who knocks you about.

I'd like to slap people like that.
My mums poor elderly lonely friend was fined because a neighbour reported on her when her son and grand children decided to visit her after not seeing anyone for a while.
It was so traumatic for her. The bunch of curtain twitchers who really want a police state are quite frightening. No empathy and just blind rule followers.

It certainly gave you a good idea of who
would have become a Stasi informant in east Germany.

DS was just turned 14, Y9 when we went into the first lockdown. He's always been quiet and had a small friendship group, but he was just starting to gain his independence and meet up with friends outside of school.

Lockdown put an end to all of that. We thought he did well coping with everything, but now he rarely meets up with friends at the weekends or during the holidays and seems to be happiest in his own company, but he is also constantly stressed about school. We are also noticing a lot of mood swings and feeling down on himself. However, how much of that is normal teenage behaviour?

He's just told me he might take a year out after his A levels and I can't say I blame him. He spent most of Y9 and part of Y10 in lockdown, with online learning. Y11 was a constant round of tests and mock exams incase exams didn't go ahead. Then into final exams. Then straight into A levels and more tests and exams. They haven't had a chance to digest what happened and re-set into "normal life".

@EndlessRain

Look, I think we are talking at cross purposes. I’ve already mentioned several times that I am privileged and recognise this. I am not blaming you, or any other parents, for not being in a similarly privileged position or for having fewer resources to mitigate the fallout. I see the effects of lockdown first hand in my own school and others (we don’t live in an especially wealthy or privileged area), and now DD has started school I’m volunteering at a reading catch-up and speech and language charity, with a view to retraining as a SALT and helping some of the children who are struggling. I get the ways in which the pandemic has vastly exacerbated existing inequalities.

I am perhaps more critical of my friends simply because I do know them well, and recognise that in many cases they have a similar level of privilege to me but their response to children and Covid was very different from my own. These friends know that I disagree with them on covid, and are equally clear about their own position on it - we’re all comfortable with debate and accept that just have opposing viewpoints.

I think it possibly comes down to how much of a rule follower people are in general - DP and I are both have a strong anti-authoritarian streak that means we’re comfortable breaking rules where we feel those rules are pointless or damaging. many of my friends are more trusting and sticklers for the rules. Just a temperament/personality thing in some ways.

Above all, though, it’s becoming clear that many of the policies around children - and in some cases the deliberate dismissal or monstering of young people - were deeply harmful and shouldn’t have been in place in the first place. It is crucial that these lessons are learned from, and that this situation is not repeated in future.

People saying they broke the rules for their own kids' mental health/development - that's all fine but do people remember what it was like? If I'd done similar, I'd have been a total social pariah.

I was surrounded by terrified people posting incessantly on SM about "selfish" people, neighbours pulled their kids from school even when they reopened as they weren't "safe", and were hugely scathing of those who did send theirs back, other people used the "it's just sitting on sofa/people are pathetic not like in the war/Brits are terrible and no one in Country X is complaining/don't want to look after their own kids" lines etc. Our school head was terrified and even when schools reopened she was demanding isolations/PCRs for every runny nose. Guilting parents in newsletter not to go to things when they were legal/open "to help keep school safe". The stigma of being the one who "brought Covid into the school", let alone if anyone got badly ill as a result.

You couldn't even say you were struggling or "you just don't care if people die, do you? So selfish!" The posts on FB/Twitter, threads on here. Many from good friends.

Fear of the social ramifications led me to be hugely compliant. I was terrified of being shamed or dobbed in because people were horrible, or feeling "to blame" for a death.

Remember "just because you can doesn't mean you should"? People were allowed daily "exercise" but they were criticised even for that by some. "Just do Joe Wicks, you don't NEED to go outside". Someone on a local FB group said shopping once a week was too much and selfish.

One of my kids is really not OK, the other seems to be fine but that's just luck really. We did our best but our support network and much-loved family members we saw several times a week "disappeared" overnight. Yes we were very lucky to have seen them again afterwards, but not everyone was so lucky, not just due to deaths from Covid. Life isn't a rehearsal - none of us know how long we have in good health, we're not just "pausing" to resume another day. Time marches on. We've lost enough people to realise that.

I do understand why people worry about more lockdowns, it seems to be coming from a place of trauma, but the odds of another one happening in the short to medium term are about as high as that of the sun rising in the west tomorrow. Not trying to comment on what will happen in 2050 or whatever, but in the current political and social climate, no. There's no money and no will for it. No politician would be stupid enough, because it would fail.

Which is fine at 2 but when they are all in school together they don’t want to break the rules

You were very lucky with your circumstances and these things can still come back later

I agree @JeanniesDiary I'd have happily let my DD meet up with a friend in the park but I remember her two closet friends mums sticking strictly to the rules.

People saying they broke the rules for their own kids' mental health/development - that's all fine but do people remember what it was like? If I'd done similar, I'd have been a total social pariah.

I do. And I think it behoves those of us who were able to be noncompliant to acknowledge those who'd have liked to but couldn't.

My Ds had to isolate as a close contact. His teachers told them that if they saw them outside they'd call the police! I told my Ds I'd drive him to a quiet place for a walk but he was too worried.

I had a DC in y3 and the teachers are saying that there are higher levels of behavioural issues in this year than in previous years or the other years at the same school.

I found it very hard on my DC at the time of lockdown because they were an only child. No sibling playing in the garden, which we could hear over fences. Friends were refusing to meet even in distanced ways. People would say set up a zoom call but at 4-5 yrs the kids couldn't understand how to use it - they'd wander into another room and think the person could still hear them etc. And then get upset that they couldn't share toys or point the camera to show things.

I found the rule-breaking just as traumatic tbh. Let's not forget that we were rightly very afraid of Covid - I was pregnant and absolutely terrified of catching it, ending up in hospital. We were seeing videos of pronged patients and people gasping for air. Of stories from paramedics and Doctors. I will never play down the seriousness of that first lockdown. I recall a man spitting in the street in front of me and I absolutely lost my shit and screamed at him - I was immensely stressed and afraid.

The subsequent lockdowns were poorly planned, implemented and muddled. My mental health suffered greatly winter 2020/21.

I’m really sorry
reading that actually made my throat burn a bit

@JeanniesDiary Quite. On our local facebook group someone took a photo of a family (parents and a toddler) sitting on a blanket on a grass verge near a road, ranting and raving about picnics being against the rules. Many others joined in in comments. It was insanity.

People followed the rules because they thought they had to, that felt it was for a good cause, they were scared, whatever. My view is that it's shitty to, in hindsight, berate them for that as though they were choosing to put the rules above their children or that they should have known and done better. Some parents won't have cared, but I would say the VERY vast majority were trying to do the best in the circumstances they had.

People saying they broke the rules for their own kids' mental health/development - that's all fine but do people remember what it was like? If I'd done similar, I'd have been a total social pariah

I get this too. I’m quite bloody minded and don’t much care what others think of me, and I’m very lucky that my immediate family were all like-minded and most of the other people I know well are quite non-judgmental and tolerant of difference. I did lose one set of friends over our very different stances on covid - I miss them, but they were all child-free and very anxious about the virus, and they just couldn’t understand why I found the treatment of young people so unnecessarily cruel. When I admitted I’d broken the rules to take my ‘isolating’ two-year-old to the park (she was a social contact of a positive case at nursery) they cancelled me.

Taking DD out and about with me during the lockdowns I was frequently glared at, shouted at and told I was killing people because children were ‘superspreaders’. Once when we were doing nothing more risky than feeding the ducks (apparently I should have confined DD to the buggy). I was told several times by train staff to put my toddler in a mask and shouted at when I refused. In the end I mainly took her out when my DP was around, or arranged for him to take her out himself at weekends, as we realised we got much less abuse when he was there - I suspect covid was used as an excuse by some to pick on and bully lone women.

I do have a couple of close friends who would have liked to have broken the rules but were worried about judgement about friends and family, and I really feel for anyone who found themselves in that position.