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!

OP it’s so hard to know where to begin with how wrong you are. I remember thinking a bit like you are when I was a teenager. I remember my righteous indignation.

You might not like it, but trauma doesn’t work the way you seem to want it to. When people develop trauma responses, their brain doesn’t care if someone somewhere in the world has had a worse experience than them. It’s well documented that a group of people can go through the same bad experience, and just a small proportion of them develop PTSD, for example. There are variety of factors which account for this. It’s a fascinating subject. Go and learn about trauma. Read what the WHO have said about the impact of the pandemic. It’s very interesting reading - you won’t be bored.

People won’t generally report their trauma to you in daily conversation either. There will be people in your life who have gone through things you can’t imagine, are suffering from it and you will never know. They will never tell you anything other than that they are fine.

Families who were struggling before the pandemic seem to have been disproportionately negatively impacted. Certain groups - women, people with disabilities for example - have been more negatively impacted. Following the pandemic, things have not necessarily improved for many people because they are in increasing poverty, waiting lists mean they still can’t access key medical services etc. It is no joke. The trauma isn’t even over for some people! They are really really suffering.

It is sad that your main thought is to berate all these people rather than accept that you don’t understand something and need to learn about it and use humility.

I disagree.
Locked down was very golf for some reason children and it's impossible to put a blanket statement over it.
In my own home I had done dc who needed it and thrived and came on academically, and the other who had been left with a physical issue and was left un taught by her school. Yet our neighbours dc at a different school actually got ahead one the curriculum and did amazingly well during lock down.
Disparity national, localised and even in ones home.

On the face of it... mine had a great time. They had each other, plenty of space, the garden and fields beyond, a parent at home. Yes they literally saw no one else really except in the distance. They knew to ignore the lines of white vans etc. Yes they knew that Dad wax out for 10 hrs 6 days a week or might disappear back to work when the phone went...

DD2 (just turned 7 at the beginning) developed severe trust issues and still struggled to make friends and plans. Its getting better, but at one point she couldn't accept that saying something will tomorrow would actually happen. She still thinks schools will close and friends will disappear at any time. (So she doesn't need friends as they disappear).

@orangeleavesinautumn in which countries do children only leave the family home for one or two hours a month and never interact with other children? I genuinely have never heard of such a culture.

Isn't it more to do with the shift from what you are used to? If you are raised that way, it is the norm. If you are used to seeing friends and family, going to school every day etc, then having that removed is stressful. if parents are not used to coping with DC while trying to work from home, that too is stressful.

As someone else working in education I can tell you we have seen the level of need and behaviour issues sky rocket since covid. The level of need coming into year 7 now is dramatically more than in previous years as is the level of behaviour.

So on those grounds in my opinion yabu

"I did not select them, I just asked the first 30-40 or so classes in front of me after returning from lockdown"

You would not have asked a child like mine.

I was frustrated to see the OPs take on this issue, but I'm actually very happy reading all the excellent responses.

It’s absolute bollocks that there are children anywhere in the world who are routinely deprived of all in-person social interaction, unless you perhaps count girls living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. And even if there are children living like this, why should we therefore have to pretend our own kids didn’t suffer? My DD absolutely did suffer - yes, perhaps not compared to some people, but she was isolated from her friends and wider family for months on end, and had everything she enjoyed taken away from her overnight. As others have pointed out, even bloody playgrounds were shut. It absolutely has had a long-term effect on her mental health and she still has residual issues with anxiety. Not because I somehow projected this onto her, but because she learned that normal life could be upended without warning. Of course that’s had an effect on lots of children.

Have an extra smug

I would say the issues OP describe are both because of covid and poor teachers like the OP being given more responsibility, as so many teachers are quitting. That and backlogs meaning ND DC are often expected to just get on with it. My DS has sen, his educational psychologist explained that the lack of interaction with non family members during covid has had an impact on him. Add to that reception teachers (the schools sen lead) describing DS as 'just naughty' illegal exclusions, proper exclusions and missing a years learning due to being 'just the naughty' kid in reception have had a huge impact. He moved schools after reception, now about to go into year 2 and the anger and anxiety (which developed in reception) have mostly subsidedabd and he is doing well.

Our LA went round the parks and chained up the swings.

Luckily OP’s method of asking children ‘you ok?’ randomly, isn’t recognised as an accurate measure of anything.

It’s not great an apparent teacher doesn’t understand the difference between anecdote and data or the influence of personal bias but maybe they’re considering a change of profession 🤷‍♀️

@orangeleavesinautumn in which countries do children only leave the family home for one or two hours a month and never interact with other children? I genuinely have never heard of such a culture.

Narnia, Ikea and Never Never Land.

It's not about what others experience though, it was different to what children here are used to. It was hard for them to miss out on seeing friends because that is what they are used to, a child on another country might not ever get to see friends but that is what they are used to so it's not a fair comparison

https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-workforce/pressures/mental-health-pressures-data-analysis

Objectively, there has been a huge and significant increase in mental ill health post pandemic. This is not all about kids being traumatised by the pandemic, though some is. One of the cohorts that has done least well is the cohort of youngsters with social anxiety and school based stress, who actually achieved respite during lockdown and had better mental health, but they haven't managed to reintegrate into societal expectations post pandemic, leading to a huge increase in school avoidance due to anxiety and burnout.

Those kids whose trauma is related to being in lockdown (rather than from being expected to return to a life they found traumatising like the school avoidance group) we know what happened was an exacerbation of existing vulnerabilities. Poor families did worse. The North did far worse than the South (in Greater Manchester they only had 3 weeks out of lockdown after March 2020, no happy reunions over Summer 2020 for them ). Children in abusive situations got no respite. Only children did worse than sibling groups. Etc.

The stats from camhs are incredible, you should look them up. Our local autism pathway had a 4 month wait pre covid, now it's 2 years and growing, and not because we stopped seeing kids during lockdown (we didn't). We had 1500 referrals in 2019. In 2021 we had 4000. Same staffing capacity. And this pathway doesn't include under 5s (they have a separate local pathway, seeing similar explosion in referrals).

Speaking personally, my child had GCSEs cancelled and lost that precious Summer after GCSEs where you and your mates start going out during the day, getting the bus to town, looking for casual work, etc. It's only now my younger child is the same age that I can really see the huge and stark contrast. He was taught half his first year of A levels online. Bubble burst repeatedly in a huge sixth form college. Became terribly socially isolated because his old friends started hanging out in the park drinking late into the night and DS didn't see the point. Lost all his confidence and friends to the point that by the time of his 18th birthday I had to ring round his old school friend's mums to see if they could persuade one or two of their sons to meet him at the pub. I was beginning to think he himself might be autistic and I had missed it (have another autistic child). Then he went to university and after a tricky first term he has found himself again - has a huge gang of mates, goes out all the time, has a girlfriend, is confident again and back to that cheeky funny kid I had before lockdown. That's just one kid, lucky enough to be in a middle class family with siblings and we didn't lose anyone to covid. Still he lost himself for the best part of 3 years. Replicate that across the country....

I believe it affected my son who was 3 years old in 2020. YABVVU

He didn't understand where his grandparents had gone and kept asking to see them ("they're at work but we can facetime later") why he couldn't go to nursery ("it's closed") why we couldn't go to the park, also "closed" but he was angry about that and thought I was lying, because we could see the empty park from upstairs window. He was too young to comprehend germs/a virus. Terrified of covid tests. And when he did go back to nursery he needed a referral to speech therapy because he was behind, whereas at his 2 year check up he was on track with all of his milestones. I felt incredibly guilty and nursery staff were beyond kind with me and told me it wasn't my fault. I also think keeping him away from others on our daily walks and telling him to hold my hand and come back to me whenever we walked past anyone else taught him to be scared/shy of strangers in an unhealthy way. The list goes on.

Our children were forced to sacrifice a lot in order to protect older generations and meanwhile, adults were breaking the rules and politicians having cheese and wine parties/affairs. The least people could do is show children a bit of respect after that and not diminish their experiences, and actual research which shows direct correlations between covid and negative impacts on children.

Same here. I kept hassling the parish council about it and they said they couldn’t let children play there unless it was deep-cleaned on a daily basis. On the whole I am more Covid-cautious than most but this made me so angry and sad for the kids in our village.

OP, you should use your very scientific survey methodology to ask 30-40 whole classes about eating disorders, self harm, abuse etc. I'm guessing you'd get 0% prevalence.

Luckily that's not how actual surveys are conducted.

The behaviour at my youth groups has become more immature; seperation anxiety, very tactile, poor attention spans, ND patterns of behaviour but no investigation/ diagnosis. The patterns of behaviour have shifted a bit as the age of children during 2020/21 gets younger. The young ones coming in now were at the school starting age at the time. Some spent much of their previous section doing it online, and came in to the groups that way. It's more evident in the group that didn't get a limited F2F period in 2020. Even 6 weeks of meeting "socially distanced" in the park as twighlight fell, helped to retain routines in the older children and made it easier to pick up the following spring. One group lost the chain of continuity- we appointed sixers who'd never been in the meeting place before.
Children are affected by their peers. A child that emerged largely unscathed is still influenced or affected by peers that are struggling. Waiting lists for anything are so long, so children with issues are going unsupported.

DS2 was in y2 at the start. Social isolation hit him hard. For months at a time, it was only legal for him to play with his autistic brother. By June 2020, he was frankly depressed. He'd lost interest in play as there was no fresh stimulation. Between bracing country walks and tears over the home learning that he just didn't have the maturity to cope with, he was almost zombie-like. We started climbing over fences to illegally play in playgrounds. When some things opened up in July, we got passes for places like the zoo and that lifted the mind-numbing tedium.
When he got back to school in September, he'd forgotten who the people in his class were. His friends had continued to go to school and developed without him while he regressed and stared at screens at home. He was beginning to settle in again when he lost another two months. Online learning was 2 months of him sobbing into my lap with the camera off, refusing to engage, taunted by images of classmates that he was banned from meeting.

It's been difficult to get his dyslexia recognised because it was "normal" to be behind in learning. School don't have the progression of data. The dyslexia was no doubt part of why he struggled with remote learning styles. But other children are struggling more and resources are limited.

My older, autistic child has learned that human relationships are unnecessary. He's happy... for now... but it's a vulnerable place to be where you have no support beyond the 3 people you live with.

My children are comparatively lucky. They live in a comfortable home with personal space, access to open space, educated parents with time, resources to facilitate learning, nutritious food. The funerial media was switched off. I bent what inconsequential rules I could. I kept things as normal as I could, things like exciting outings to the supermarket, and going places when they were open. However, I can't substitute their social needs for peers but all other needs were met. They have lost extended family. Older family that have survived this era are now too insular to maintain contact. Others died anyway- they never saw one grandparent again because international travel & carehome restrictions ended at the end of her life when she was too frail to recognise them. Patterns of meeting up across long distances were broken.

My children weren't abused, struggling poverty, kept in extended isolation etc. There are children who have suffered far, far more. Some didn't survive as interventions that could have saved them weren't in place. My child protection friend's workload is through the roof. Cases are nastier and more complex. Early interventions in 2020 didn't happen so problems escalated. A lot of people didn't want to contemplate the inevitable in 2020. I was regularly lambasted for suggesting these consequences of extended lockdown measures, but these problems reverberate across all of society.

DS1 would tell you that lockdown was great. At 12, he can't see the impacts that extended isolation had on his newly diagnosed autustic self.
DS2 would tell you that it was boring and lonely. 10 year olds don't tend to recognise that their 7yo self was depressed, and that he's never regained the full social confidence that he had as a 6 year old.

There's a lot of shit in the world, but let's not race to the bottom and join the other abusers of human rights.

I do agree we shouldn’t be telling the kids how traumatic it was for them, because it runs the risk of cementing it further.

I also want to know where in the world it’s normal to see family and other kids for 1-2 hours a month?

my child is an only child because I nearly died trying to have a second.

as the poster above, the swings were removed from the park. The park itself play area was taped with biohazard yellow tape.

The shops were closed, her grandparents were stuck overseas, my husband was working as a key worker.

She didn’t have contact with another child for months, didn’t see her grandparents for years, didn’t see her cousins for 18 months.

I can’t think of any country where that’s normal!

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

do you really believe that seeing other children is a privilege?

Glad to see majority is yabu

Exactly. Failed logic there

I saw a headline a while back claiming that children’s mental health actually improved during lockdown - but they were only looking at the mental health of children who had been to school throughout both lockdowns (as children of key workers etc). Apparently they’d had a much better time of it in school than they normally did: turns out that tiny class sizes, less bullying, lots of emphasis on wellbeing, and a flexible curriculum including outdoor activities are really good for kids. Who’d have thought it?!

This was happening all over. Some people have got very short memories.

Canada, US, Spain, Germany and Austria are all reporting significant worsening in mental health of their children post-lockdown actually. I don’t know about France as my French isn’t good enough to research.

And I’m not sure how many of children you personally know who have grown up in war zones unable to play outside as too dangerous, but I know several Iraqis who were children during the Gulf War, and several Ukrainians, and it certainly has had an impact. Again, this is all fairly well established. Bizarre that you would think otherwise.