to think uk children in general did not have a bad experience during the pandemic

[orangeleavesinautumn]

Just read yet another post when inappropriate behaviour in a teen is put down to delayed trauma from covid times.

Having worked as a teacher in many countries, I can tell you that the conditions we called "lock down" are normal life for many of the world's children, and our children are incredibly privileged compared to most.

They didn't really suffer, they just had a slightly less ultra-privileged life for a short time. They were not more isolated and deprived than "normal" they were less isolated and deprived than normal, in a world wide sense - they were just more isolated and deprived than we have come to expect in our wealthy world.

Some may have been afraid, or bereaved, but most were not, and many enjoyed themselves enormously, more children I know preferred lock down to normal school, than preferred normal school to lockdown - and I have asked literally hundreds of children!

Can we stop telling them they are disadvantaged and traumatised now please!

True but a lot of Covid management consisted of ‘suck it and see’. How could it be any other way for a completely new virus? The government was aware of the flu season of course, but it also had to balance that against real life and lockdowns being untenable.

Tests are an established way of controlling outbreaks of disease, it wasn’t unreasonable for those in charge to think the same might apply in the case of Covid. (What was unreasonable was that lanky streak of piss Rees-Moggs standing up in parliament essentially telling parents to shut up when the government completely failed to provide enough testing capability because they couldn’t have possibly known there would be an increase in demand come the return to schools 🙄)

‘Earliest days’ as you say - no problem.

If that had not been prolonged by the overall campaign I’d be totally fine with that.

If it had stopped the conversations would have been very different. Covid is still around now but since dropped from fear approach society moves on too.

No issue with earliest days being different to two years damage.

I think it does vary massively, there are those who say that the covid lockdown was not an issues and in some ways improved their teenagers experience but there are other for whom the whole experience has proved to be awful with long term damage occurring. I have seen teenagers who have really suffered during the pandemic - isolation, totally useless online lessons - dreadful educational experience in between the lockdowns bringing out the worst in the teaching profession, but I know that is not everyone's experience. I think it varies and we need to acknowledge this, there will be some young people who take years to recover from the experience and others who simply take longer to mature as they catch up on the missed experience.

I have no idea where you teach, OP, but we are the impact of Covid on the kids in my school every day.

Communication and language skills, social and emotional skills, and even their physical development have been affected.

I suggest you do a bit more research. Look at things like the 'toxic trio'. Look at the mental health reports for young people. Don't base it on a few people you had a chat with.

If you were the parent of anyone with LD you were told early on that people with LD wouldn’t get a ventilator if they needed it. I’m guessing that everyone who loves a disabled person hasn’t really come back from that.

Ds still refers to it as being the best year of school he had. I think it also made his ASD/ADHD diagnosis easier-I'd heard stories of how it could easily be 2 years. It took time to get started, but we had both diagnosis surprisingly quickly and easily. I'd referred him in March 2020. On-line consultations suited him much better than taking him somewhere he didn't know.
Not sure it did his academics much good, but I only realised when he was back at school full time how much mental effort just being at school is for him. he was a different child through lockdown-in a good way.

However it did effect dd2's mental health quite badly. Not actually the lockdown, but the constant media reports of how badly lockdown was effecting children's mental health. Part of her mental health issues mean that she's very suggestable, so the more she was told it was bad for her, the worse she got, even though she really quite enjoyed the time off school and especially missing her GCSEs.

My Grandsons are home educated so didn't know any different.
But my eldest was 15 and caught covid bad.. he reverted back to being a toddler ..his Mum had to bath him.. feed him.. dress him.
He lost 3 stone in weight and now suffers long covid ..where he has bouts of AFRID and depression.
Traumatised is not a big enough word.

@ZairWazAnOldLady my son has LD and I still struggle with the fact that he could be denied treatment like that. Also that I wasn't allowed to see my 12 year old when he was in hospital after an overdose while Boris Johnson was having parties.

Yabu. If parents were not key workers, then children and parents were completely isolated, for months at a time.

One day, without warning, they were told that they were no longer allowed to see friends or wider family. Their routines were completely disrupted. They had no chance to socialise (younger kids had no way to speak to their friends). Outdoor activity was super restricted during the first lock down to one hour a day.

Many kids were stuck at home with parent who were trying to do full time jobs and homeschool. I know my own household was a stress nightmare at this time. A house full of people 23/7. The noise, the mess, the conflicting demands. Things were shouty, things were messy, it was insane.

Families were without their usual support networks. We got no break and no help and were parenting harder than ever, trying to be teacher, parent (and employee) and be the only form of social and emotional support for our children.

My kids didn’t get to see their grandparents for about 18 months as we live in different parts of the country that had different restrictions at different times.

The lack of health services available during Covid has really done a number on children and their parents (and therefore how well they can look after their children too).

Add to this the general fear that children must have felt knowing that we were in a pandemic?

And this is just my experience. I can’t imagine what it was like for people with new norms. Or kids doing their A levels or starting university.

I think kids have been completely fucked over by covid.

Was it two years damage? I suppose the length of time varies on what repercussions you attribute to what but I would say things had largely calmed down by mid 2021, certainly social restrictions were largely lifted by July 2021. ‘The Fear’ approach largely dissipated due to vaccinations which obviously impacted public perceptions. Granted, ‘softer’ measures weren’t dropped for some months after.

spontaneous reaction and media propaganda are too tangled to attribute a specific campaign to public response. It’s a bit chicken and egg. The government is there to represent the people not tell them how they want to be represented.

I’m not comfortable with the notion that any conversation should have been ‘stopped’ personally. People responded to an event that had never happened in our lifetimes before on a global scale. To think you could tell people to just stop it seems wildly unforgiving of basic human emotions and perception. Ultimately I don’t think it would have worked because on the whole, that’s just not how people work.

People will defend their reaction understandably, and whilst you can’t stop it I think many were ridiculous on here.

I get they don’t want to acknowledge that though and won’t see it. Annoying as that is I could see the manipulation then and now.

Instead I’ll go with questioning what prompted that behaviour which was the daily fear campaign.

That was highly questionable and top down. Without it we’d be closer to now, Covid circulating but no one getting upset or abusive over it. Or a few idk I avoid the board.

It was a policy decision to whip up fear over the virus but largely ignore the damage from lockdown. The public just reacted to that.

Again not the earliest days. But ongoing.

I work in LD services and we are still seeing the impact it had on some of our service users now. Some amazing, absolutely fucking life enhancingly epic projects closed, never to reopen. Lots of incredibly good carers left their posts from how awfully they were treated and it's left staffing in a sector that struggles at the best of times in a mess - with high turnover, agency staff, staff that are shuffled around and don't know the people they're working with - the subsequent knock on of behaviours escalating when they could be de-escalated, information not being passed on as staff turnover went through the roof, overmedication as a result of challenging behaviour - and I'm still working through referrals for people who are too out of routine and out of ability to cope with things they previously loved and so no longer leave their home.

Dealing with more OCD type behaviour, people who coped with the loss of everything that they planned their lives around (for lots of our client base they NEED that structure and routine to map their whole understanding of lives around) being stripped away by self-harm - and people who hit the point where they would have begun to appear on our radar during Covid fire-fighting time - now only hitting our radar when the shit really has hit the fan. Not to mention carer stress and placement breakdowns.

I'd say about 40% of my caseload is still supporting carers and families with issues as a consequence of the lockdowns and how people with LD responded and were treated.

Still have homes going into "outbreak" measures and basically locking down with residents confined to rooms as well. Some of the care homes I visit were mandating masks until last month - for people with significant communication impairments that loss of visual information to support communication for that prolonged length of time is bloody huge!

I don’t really think it’s your place to say who did and didn’t suffer. Clearly many children did or there wouldn’t be people saying it. Maybe just mind your own and be thankful of your own privilege that you were one of the unaffected ones.

They played the fear up and down quite intentionally - some of the published What's App messages from ministers capable of remembering their mobile phone PIN codes showed that quite clearly. Timing of when to announce a new variant (and some of the choices of names) prior to Bank Holidays and occasions when people might be thinking about mixing, and the tones of messaging - it was like watching an orchestra being conducted with the "positivity" section being upped in volume, then quietened down ready for the "doom" section at times. It was incredibly Orwellian and as things went on longer, I think a lot of it was behavioural scientists and the nudge unit, having this amazing real life experiment opportunity to have a try at putting all their theory into practice.

There was also a substantial amount of consistency around some posts on social media - I remain convinced that there were some afoot on here, and definitely on other avenues such as Twitter, newspaper comments sections etc - all with remarkably similar in terms of the facts tales of marathon running teachers who were at work on the Friday and dead by the Sunday and the like.

We were played. We will be played again unless we are allowed to have a full and open dialogue about the entire response to the pandemic - not just the bereaved families and CEV having their say - but everyone down to the kids (and their advocates if they can't speak for themselves), the struggling families of those with SEND who found themselves cut adrift from all support services, the parents who ended up on anti-depressants up to the eyeballs just to get through the pandemic at a functional level to keep their kids going (checking in on this one unashamedly here - I was on the max dose possible with my remit to the GP being "I need to keep going for the kids - keep me going and I'll patch my brain up properly after this is all over").

I am INCREDIBLY uncomfortable at the consistent attempts at the moment to minimise the impact upon certain sectors of society and to control the direction of the Covid Enquiry.

With our kids it was just a temporary loss of some privileges that most kids never experience anyway - not something bad that happened to them

Privileges? Seriously? You think the RIGHT to education and the RIGHT to healthcare are privileges? What about access to public services, access to the outdoors and to play and to see relatives and exist as part of society? None of these are privileges, these are basic human needs. NEEDS.

Yep, education, healthcare, social interaction... damn those privileges.

I am INCREDIBLY uncomfortable at the consistent attempts at the moment to minimise the impact upon certain sectors of society and to control the direction of the Covid Enquiry.

Me too. It’s highly politicised still and the system is flawed

Where is the person accountable for the mh of dc, of adults, of the huge costs to businesses still ongoing, whether fear tactics should be used at all.

Right now the framing still seems to be how many people died.

It has to look at the costs otherwise it’s more of the same.

I highly recommend jumping on the thread about the person who's mortgage is becoming unaffordable to them soon and tell them that they really aren't suffering because there are people who don't have homes and are living on the streets in fear for the lives from war in other countries. I imagine you'll get a very similar response to what you've had here OP.
A person's bad experience is theirs, and it's personal to them. You can't turn around and compare it to something that is so far removed from their reality and then tell them to get over it. I hope none of your friends or family have depression or anxiety OP because you would be absolutely shit at helping them.

You could also go tell the women in Iran that all the things they are fighting for are just privileges and they should be satisfied to simply be alive 🙄

Have you asked what / how other people in deprived areas feel?
I'm sure some slaves in history felt safe in their masters house. While others didn't.

In my own family ds1 struggled and ds2 thrived. Ds3 was born early and needed 3days in nicu, where I was only allowed to visit him once a day. The rules were, one parent, per day, per child.

Does ds3 have the most claim to possible trauma caused by disrupted bonding/ attachment? Or does ds1 who put two and two together and assumed I must dieing in hospital because he heard I was admitted to hospital (for birth and steroids). He said people in the news are saying people who go into hospital are dieing.

I video called him and calmed him down. He really wanted a hug. He is also an extrovert child who hated not going places and seeing faces/ smiles. He gained weigh because his clubs were closed. Our leisure center opened in 2022 for lessons. He absolutely hated the covid tests and we forced him to them when needed.

Was it two years damage? I suppose the length of time varies on what repercussions you attribute to what but I would say things had largely calmed down by mid 2021, certainly social restrictions were largely lifted by July 2021.

@Cornettoninja two school years were disrupted - 2019/20 and 2020/21.

Yes, it did. However, the posts you're replying to here stem from me asking someone why they think an earlier lockdown would've led to schools (I assume in England, obv not relevant in all UK) opening again in June and July. None of what you've written really addresses that, although plenty of it is true. If anything, lockdowns being untenable as a longer term solution would be more of a reason to loosen restrictions when cases were low and the flu season not looming.

Tbh I do feel like you’ve focussed on Covid when actually a lot of what you seem to be raising is evident throughout society in many areas on many subjects. Maybe it was just more visible during Covid in particular or was more noticeable due to lack of other events going on, but there has been a lot of manipulation going on for a long time. Even pre-Covid.

I don’t believe Covid itself was manufactured like some quarters would argue, but I do feel like the reality of the situation has become skewed because people are so focussed on Covid examples. I mean look around, it’s been happening regularly for years. The result of end stage capitalism and unwavering belief in unlimited growth imveryho, but that does need to be separated from the realities we face. And it will always be ‘we’ because that’s the foundation of society and civilisation.

With our kids it was just a temporary loss of some privileges that most kids never experience anyway - not something bad that happened to them

I find it difficult to compute this sentence. The phrase ‘loss of privileges’ generally is used to describe a punishment. So regardless of length, something bad objectively happened. Survivable and possible to overcome but still bad and completely out of control of the child who lost those privileges.

Well yes I’m focusing on Covid as this thread is about the pandemic and I could also see the impact of the Covid response clearly on people’s behaviour.

If you want to expand to everything not sure I have the appetite, but maybe others will here or on another thread.