To ask teachers and parents if Covid still has an impact on kids four years on

[Backtoit123]

Just that really. Four years on don’t still notice a major effect on children from the pandemic. I’ve heard teenagers say they feel a few years younger due to their ‘pandemic age’ but my DC are grown up and I don’t work in teaching so it’s hard to know. Do you recognise a major difference in kids now compared to kids of the same age before Covid? AIBU to ask if the pandemic still has left a legacy on children’s development?
YABU- no it doesn’t
YANBU- yes it does

As with all things COVID the range of experiences was huge…even if you simply had a parent who was furloughed and could therefore actually supervise primary age DC vs having key worker working from home parents who at best could sit in the same room and check that the DC was at the computer. Unsurprisingly some families were worse hit than other and some DC are still delayed either academically or socially.

I was seething at the time when you could only meet in pairs unless you were under five because it wasn’t like my just seven year old could socialise with a mate on his own but officially I couldn’t take him to meet anyone. I can well imagine his age group having more social challenges than DS2’s (he was young enough that I could take him for a walk with another child his age and their parent!).

At the other end of the educational spectrum, I am involved in graduate recruitment in my company and we have noticed a significant difference in the levels of maturity of potential recruits and how they come across in interviews in the last couple of years (they would have been at uni during 2020/21)

Even those that do get hired, there are many more performance issues than previous cohorts e.g. having to be micromanaged in order for deadlines to be met, not taking on feedback, interactions with colleagues etc.

However a lot of that is the impact of wfh as well as experiences during covid (but that’s a different thread)

If you’d asked me a year ago I’d have said mine (now 7 and 9) were fine. But the 9 year old has been having anxiety issues recently, and having done some reading about childhood anxiety, it’s blindingly fucking obvious that the pandemic had an effect, even if at the time I was very self congratulatory about how well our kids came out of it. Children take their cues from the adults around them about whether to be anxious and worried. They spent a year or more watching us all worry about elderly relatives, try to be teacher, parent and employee all at the same time, stressed all the time. They were constantly told wash your hands, you don’t want to get sick. Don’t get too close to people. Follow the rules, we don’t want to get into trouble. Amongst my eldest’s cohort (and siblings), there are so many anxiety issues. I know multiple children with OCD, emetophobia. It just seems so unlikely that it’s not linked to the fact they just lived through a pandemic.

Genuine question for those who work with kids/young people. From reading threads like this, it seems clear that behaviour, resilience, anxiety etc has all noticeably changed in the last few years. I can’t help but wonder how much of this is a result of how much time both parents and teens are spending on the internet and social media.

e.g. Some people are mentioning long waits for autism assessments- presumably this is partly a result of higher parental awareness?

Uni students unable to engage - is this partly because they’re very used to staring at screens all the time, much more than previous generations did?

Four years olds without resilience - anything to do with current parenting trends?

I have no doubt that lockdown has had an effect on certain cohorts, but I do wonder if a lot of this would have happened anyway. The way people communicate and consume information has changed. However I don’t have kids - would love to hear what the professionals think.

Also of course lockdown and the internet are connected, as people spent a lot more time indoors!

@AnnieRegent i think the anxiety a lot of people feel is actually screen withdrawal symptoms.

I think we’ve been very fortunate. DD lost big chunks of years 5 and 6, and there were still restrictions when she started Y7, but she was old enough to have an established group of friends by the first lockdown (and socialise with them online) but young enough not to lose anything really crucial academically- she’s an academically able child which helps, and a big cohort from her primary school went to the same secondary, which also helped . But she really, really suffered through the lockdowns, being a proper extrovert, and I wasn’t at all sure she could bounce back. She’s nearly 14 now so something could still come back and bite us, but I’m cautiously optimistic that she’ll be OK. Most of her friends seem to be fine too as far as one can tell from the outside.

@BoPeepsSheep Can I ask what your role is in child development please? I'm currently studying and interested in child development and what job roles there are in that field.

My DS was in year 7 and was just finding his feet at school so really struggled when they eventually went back; absolutely hates school now and can’t wait to leave this year. My DD didn’t get to take her A levels started uni in the Oct of 2020 but it was mostly online, she ended up dropping out in the second year but managed to get an apprenticeship at a law firm and is now a para legal. Hopefully my DS when he goes to college will start to pick up, he’s keen to start and is eager to get a job and or apprenticeship.

I’m sure there are other factors. Some of this was probably coming for us anyway. And screens are probably a big factor. But I’d still link that back to Covid. We forced our kids onto screens for lessons. For older children and teenagers, screens were the only way they could keep in touch with their friends. At a formative age, we taught them that their main way of interacting with the world should be via a screen.

We’ve been lucky but reading this thread is sad

More people should have listened at the time

Yes agree

I agree with some of the recent posts - a lot of the ongoing impact is a third hand impact of lockdowns rather than firsthand. The increased use of screens, the rise of tik tok etc. Society seems to have changed - people are more short tempered and self centred, more questioning of authority. Don’t forget everything that happened alongside covid - George Floyd, BLM, Sarah Everard. Conspiracy theories and societal polarization - vax vs unvax. Cost of living crisis and ridiculous NHS waiting lists. All of those things have an effect on parents and children.

You are very lucky ❤️

Because parents were screaming for it. Look up MN threads from around 10 March 2020 onwards.

Not sure why they remained closed for so long though - I was really surprised by that.

I don't think it had a lasting impact on my son. However, he is still enraged by the missed opportunities caused by Brexit (as am I).

I agree with this and thank you for saying it.

Also between elderly people who ignored the rules, went out, and saw people, and are still functioning well for their age, and those who hid indoors or were forced indoors (care homes) and now have dementia, anxiety and lack of physical ability.

I also agree.

A 300% increase in the number of referrals for autism assessment has not been accompanied by any increased funding for staff. And even if it could be staffed, there are no extra clinic rooms for the appointments.

There are a great many reasons for this increase. The sorry state of CAMHS means that people are referring to paediatrics because there’s no hope of being seen by CAMHS, or because they’ve waited so long that the mental Heath issues have worsened so that it may look like a neurodevelopmental condition when it’s actually untreated MH.

Also, a combination of increased screen use and decreased social interaction has led to greater prevalence of social communication difficulties, again that can look like autism and is indeed one of features of the condition.

Parents are ‘internet savvy’ and ‘know their rights.’ They get their children referred in, and when they are found not to have a diagnosis, parents go down lengthy complaint routes to say that they disagree with the clinicians who made the decision. And rather than being able to turn around and nip that in the bud with ‘we are qualified to make that decision, and you are not’ the clinical teams are instead forced to spend untold numbers of hours dealing with their complaint, to the detriment of the children who need their turn to be assessed.

The ‘second opinion’ then agrees with the findings of the original team, which proves what a stupendous waste of time the whole ‘respond to this complaint’ charade was. And so the waiting list grows.

Lastly, the huge increase in immigration has an effect.

It’s relevant because there are many who for some reason thrived. My 3 loved it. I enjoyed homeschooling so much I became a TA. The op was not asking for all negative responses. I look around my friendship and family group with their children and there are no after effects.

Perhaps none that you know about.

I can say with confidence that our friends have very little idea what we have been through with DD2.

I thought we had very few after effects too, until recently. I think some of the longer term effects were not immediately obvious, and I think we’ve probably got more to come. Children missed out on chunks of development. The effect that has on their ability to cope with life as they get older may only become apparent as they, well, get older. I don’t mean that to sound dismissive by the way - I’m sure not all children were negatively affected. But I really do think that the knock on effects of lockdowns will be with us for years to come. We did a proper number on our kids, and on ourselves.

No . This media rubbish adding a year every year ‘oh they have missed 3 years of school’ is garbage. Mollycoddling kids most have forgot it even happened.

This is such a great post with so much to think about, as is the subsequent one mentioning the possibility of screen withdrawal. The lockdowns forced everyone on to screens for much longer than previously. Work, school, news, leisure - hugely reliant on internet.

I was on maternity leave when lockdown started, I'd been working in a school with eyfs/ks1 children before that. I didn't go back for long (changed jobs to be nearer home).

I just recently started a similar job in a different school with ks1. These children just seem young compared to the same age group before. Particularly socially and as far as speech and language development goes.
Of course it's a tiny sample size and purely anecdotal, but the teaching staff say the same when considering their pre-covid classes in comparison to their current ones.

Particularly, the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers seems wider than ever.

I don't find my own daughters to be particularly impacted, but I believe that is due to the way that they experienced the lockdowns etc.

However the Year 4 class I teach are MASSIVELY affected. Of course, it is not all of them but a good 80%. There is no easy comparison as we can't see what they would have been like without the pandemic. But you can absolutely tell that they missed Reception and a good chunk of year 1 both in their academic level, resilience, emotional intelligence and addiction to screens.