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.

My dd in yr 5 has been hugely affected, anxiety, can’t regulate emotions, low self esteem, can’t cope with change very well now. It breaks my heart how covid and lockdowns have changed her. She is getting support at school now, and i’m doing everything I can at home but I’m scared for her future and I hope it’s not too little too late.

Ds now yr 11 hasn’t been affected emotionally but academically has suffered.

DS is in yr3 now and first lock down was in reception when he was 4 years old. He was at school in key worker class for 4 days a week. This did him good as reception - Yr 6 students were all together as so few of them. He built confidence being around older children, different teachers and being taught in different areas of the school. The head said to me was impressed with his resilience as he usually struggles severely with change and gets support around his emotional behaviour (since he was 2 years old and restarted in year 2).

Teachers have reported year 3 now to be the most disruptive in the in the school as a result if covid. They still have never had a school trip.

DS hated people even having a cold or going to the chemist or Dr's and worries that being ill with anything means dying.

@PuttingDownRoots

Can I ask how on earth you can identify holes in math work!

As an aside op my dd thrived in lock down! Totally understand some didn't but older dd has suffered physically.

DS2 was friends with children who were allowed into school as keyworker children. Not seeing them for 6 months meant that at 7, he had to start again in the September having lost his social confidence. Then he lost 2 more months out of school. Home learning was a failure. The Educational Psychologist who has now diagnosed him with dyslexia has confirmed that we didn't stand a chance. (I also didn't stand a chance with his dyslexic, dyspraxic, autistic brother). By the time we got to remote lessons, I'd sit there on Teams daily with him sobbing into my lap. Making an 8yo see school friends on screen and making contact illegal was cruel.
His friends didn't need to see him because they were legally allowed to see each other in school and I didn't know their parents well enough to suggest breaking the law to them.

In June 2020 when the weather cooled off, there were days that he'd lie on my bed staring at the TV. 3 months without a NT child to play with left him too uninspired to play. In the July as things opened up and there were things to do other than climb over fences into playgrounds and go on long walks, he began to get a bit of himself back.

He didn't really heal until last school year and he's now finally finding the social confidence that he had when he was 6 when this began. He's now 9. Even so he often resists going to school because the life lesson he got at 7 in y2 & 3 was that school wasn't essential, and not all children have to go.

His dyslexia assessment is 18m later than his brother's (by age). He clearly has had Covid education gaps, but the glaringly obvious signs of dyslexia have been overlooked because of the loss of education.

He's lost out massively on family. He never saw Granny again. We travelled over in 2021 in the face of rapidly flip flopping travel restrictions, and while we did make it over, local restrictions were too strict for him to see her in hospital/ care settings. From that point her health was too fragile and volitile to make family travel plans again. She died this year. While we were visiting, because of the country's stance on vaccinated/ unvaccinated, family members wouldn't let him in their houses. Cousins have grown and reached adulthood, a transition more stark for having seen less of them.
The other side of the family are too spread across the UK for bubbles/ visits in 2020. They've become more insular. DS barely remembers who half of them are any more.

I did my best for him, but I couldn't force him into school, and I couldn't create interested family and friends for him.
I have given him better resources to recover and catch up than many can though. It's been a disaster for polarising inequality. I spoke up about that at the time and few wanted to listen. Parents who admitted to struggling at the time were given a thorough kicking about it.

I heard a statistic recently that more young people have died from suicide than from Covid itself. Measures constantly disregarded the needs of children. Places to play, the rule of 6, no allowence for children to be supervised and meet another person beyond their household if they were over 5, usually the last settings to open. It's already emerging in reports that the government knew the toll of closing schools and did it anyway. Universities also behaved appallingly.

On Monday 6th July 2020, I could have taken my children to the pub... but not to school.

I know kids who were trying to do online school from their phone,
kids who did badly at school as they had to look after younger siblings while their parents were struggling wfh,
Kids who live in crowded flats in deprived areas where they had no access to decent parks so didn't go out for weeks.

What we are seeing is what happens when parents aren't able to outsource all their parenting to the state. Children weren't at home alone, they were with their families. Abusive situations aside there is no reason why they shouldn't have developed good social skills and managed quite well. If parents didn't prioritise their children's development and wellbeing during lockdown then that is on them. If parent's were anxious and shared that anxiety with their young children, if they didn't engage with them socially, if they allowed their child to become withdrawn and isolated then those are failures of parenting not an inevitable outcome of lockdown.

"Late December 2021 saw the emergence of omicron and it took a while for it to be clear how mild that variant was. Pre- and post-omicron covid were two very different times and places."

It was clear that Omicron was mild right from the beginning. I remember a dr from South Africa utterly bemused by the overreaction as she kept telling everyone that it was mild.

What we are seeing is what happens when parents aren't able to outsource all their parenting to the state

What absolute crap.

if they allowed their child to become withdrawn and isolated then those are failures of parenting not an inevitable outcome of lockdown

But children couldn't go to school. It was illegal to meet a friend in the park for a playdate. All their extra curricular activities were cancelled. How do you propose in that situation a parent can stop them feeling isolated. We were told to isolate ffs.

No parent can adequately socialise a child purely at home. Children need to play with children from outside the family. And that's before you consider the fact that the majority of parents were working. I only had to do it for three months and it was hell. I have no idea how the parents of school aged children coped.

Years 3 and 6 are, in my experience as a teacher, extremely badly affected. Closely followed by the rest of infants: early years education is so undervalued, but absolutely the lynchpin of the entire system. I am in year 5 currently, ability is reasonably average across the board, but maturity is definitely much lower than you'd expect of 9-10 year olds. The deprivation gap is absolutely devastating. We are a very deprived area as it is and some of the effects are heartbreaking.

Within my own children, I decided very early on that we were going to be back OUT in the world as soon as it was legally possible. We went to a theme park the day they reopened (best visit ever), we went on holiday in summer 2020 (UK), we visited family, we broke rules to 'accidentally' bump into friends at the park. In 2021 we arranged birthday parties in the garden for DCs so they didn't miss out on another year of them. I think, for very understandable reasons, many people stayed cautious, where we did not, and the prolonged effect of a change of normal behaviour is becoming apparent. My eldest is Y11 and his apathy towards school is painful, ditto the Y10. I'm reasonably sure they'd have been that way regardless though, they are lazy feckers (yes, I do stuff about it). Y6 DS horrendously affected academically, despite being in school almost the entire closure time as he has an EHCP. He has ASD and the constantly changing rules/routines etc made school virtually inaccessible beyond just being there. He's happy though, which is my main concern. Y4 DD was broken by lockdown initially, she definitely struggled the most with missing friends, school etc. We have just about built her back up to being confident now. She spent months selectively mute due to anxiety; it was awful.

I'm glad we made the choices we did, despite the desperate lockdown-devotees thinking we were murdering Grannies.

Oh, do fuck off. I’d say more, but I’m sure others will be along to do so shortly.

It really was heartbreaking.

At first she wouldn't engage with the sessions, but then she realised the anxiety was affecting her at school / socially, so she asked to resume it. I'm hopeful it will get better.

Thank you 💐

@trumpet50 excuse me, what?

Please do explain how my (non-existent) anxieties and hours a day spent home schooling, playing Roblox, painting, playing in the garden with my kids etc, led to their mental health issues?

Maybe it isn't about bad parenting. More an unprecedented situation where parents ended up being their children's entire world for months on end, and that being a generally unhelpful and highly unusual state of affairs for all concerned.

Parents who had to work and home school their children, only children with no siblings to interact with, one parent families.... There are many reasons why being at home would still be isolating despite the best efforts of the parents.
Parents aren't miracle workers - it takes a village to raise a child

Government should have spent far more on enabling schools to operate effectively during the lockdowns (other than the first one, when far too little was understood about the virus to be able to react in a more nuanced way), and should be spending far more on young people, now. Schools simply could not have carried on completely as normal pre-vaccines, but far more effort and money could and should have been invested in making life as normal and social as possible for the young. That, however, would have required making the young the focus, and the very young can neither vote, nor are they economically active, so that was never going to happen, was it? Even now, this will only change if it just so happens to coincide with the needs and expectations of economically active adults.

Also, the trope that children are resilient has been trotted out for decades, it didn’t start with covid, and it is used to excuse all sorts of harms done to young people by society, as evidenced by trends towards increasing self-harm, anxiety, depression, speech and language difficulties, and difficulties regulating emotions that were already very apparent in young people pre-covid. Covid just laid bare how far society’s focus is removed from its youngest members.

Perfectly put @Walkaround .

Actually what we are seeing is a generation of young people whose education, mental health, social skills and future property was sacrificed for the benefit of the older generation to protect them against dying from a disease with an average age of mortality of 82.4 years.

Simple gratitude would be a good start.

Schools could have continued to operate as normal. It was quickly established who the vulnerable people were and it was not children or (most) teachers.
We have sacrificed children and young people to 'save' elderly people who quite often didn't want to be 'saved' . They actually wanted to see their grandchildren and know they were living instead of existing.
I do blame the government and also the media, they embarked on a huge propaganda campaign to scare people and it worked. Far too many people were scared or just didn't look any further into things than what was shown on TV. Moderate voices were shut down and ridiculed.

Children need more than their immediate family unit.

They need peers, extended family, role models, teams. Parents and siblings (if they have any) can not meet all that themselves.

Parents need support. Parents need childcare to be able to work properly. Children need education from appropriately trained and experienced staff and with peers- even children who are home educated tend to do it with groups and join extra-curricular activities. Children can't learn social skills in isolation. Interacting with peers is very different to interacting with adults. Adults play differently to children.

The government funds nursery hours for 3-4 year olds because they know that that peer socialising is important for good development. They don't throw money at children for the fun of it.

When DM talks about her WW2 childhood, it's getting through it as a family including her aunt and grandparents that she talks about.

God I hate this place sometimes.

I didn't want to "outsource parenting to the state" ffs, I wanted to pop to the playpark with my kids and for them to have birthday parties and a normal childhood, instead of trying to work (to, y'know, keep a roof over our heads) while home-schooling with literally no other support or outlet for any of us. Seriously, fucking hell.

I bet you were a star pupil I'm school with all this clever logic and reasoning 👏🏾👏🏾🙄.

My daughter had properly timetabled lessons throughout lockdown, chats and games with her friends, we went for bike rides /walks / chats / Netflix series / family zoom - all the engagement she could need.

We are a close knit family, to the point people used to think she was my sister's child. Nothing - no zoom call or whatever - could replace the close bond she had with her grandparents and cousins, who she couldn't see / touch for the better part of 2 years.

She also missed being in class with her friends, visiting her aunt overseas, with whom she shares /celebrate her birthday.

I thought my daughter had come out relatively unscathed, until I found out she hadn't.

Nobody had their education sacrificed, at worst it was interrupted. What became very clear was that people weren't concerned about the educational impact nearly so much as they were bothered by the impact on their free childcare. I am sure lots of people are going to continue to shout me down, but it's not really surprising given that they are likely the people who struggled to parent their children full time.

@trumpet50

"if they didn't engage with them socially, if they allowed their child to become withdrawn and isolated then those are failures of parenting not an inevitable outcome of lockdown."

+++

From my considerable experience on this topic I can tell you that children and young people need face to face interaction with people of their own age to develop social skills and not a 40 year old mum that had no choice but to place her child in front on the TV again because she was working from home dealing with an "irate Derek from accounts" demanding to know why a particular invoice hadn't been paid.