Did the benefits of lockdown outweigh the harm to children’s education?

[PoisedKhakiUser]

AIBU to ask whether the benefits of lockdown - saving lives and protecting health - outweighed the damage it did to children’s education and future life chances? I feel like kids lost out on so much during this time, and I wonder if the cost was too high.

These threads are always interesting, because I agree it has clearly affected children's mental health and behaviour, and the behaviour of those who are now young adults.

But I worked in a&e during lock down. We were drowned in sick people looking fir help, ran out of PPE, soap, alcohol gel, hand towels and body bags. People were just dying all over the place.

I’m a teacher and Sept 2020-Dec 2020 was a nightmare in schools. We had no ventilation (apart from open a window), masks and hand gel. We had monitors in class to measure the CO2 and was told to turn them off as they kept beeping all the time as ventilation was so inadequate. We weren’t prioritised for vaccines. Myself, the classes I taught, were in and out of school constantly for isolation and contact of Covid positive staff and students. Even if schools had been open in Summer 2020 and Spring 2021, we would have had this mess anyway. Obviously some areas were hit harder. I’m in the Midlands and we never really came out of lockdown due to the tiers. Schools were hit hard here when we returned. I guess a better funded area could afford ventilation for their schools but we didn’t and hence, we just kept seeing staff and students ill.

Which really goes to show how important it that we as a society are exposed to a wide range of expertise.

You were well placed to see the impact of covid and risk to the NHS at that point. A specialist in, say, domestic violence, alcoholism or childhood obesity would've been seeing the risks that lockdown posed, while being less qualified than you are to speak on what was happening in A and E.

It's a problem that once we'd gone with the lockdown based approach, especially after the first one, we were hearing a lot more about the risks of covid than the risks of restrictions. They both needed to be part of the conversation.

I don’t think my children were harmed by lockdown, we bubbled with my parents and they had good support at home, enjoyed home learning and in the main coped really well. However, I work in a CAMHS service and see every day the impact on children, especially those who were more vulnerable or at risk. For some young people it altered their path into adulthood with potential long term issues.

Yes I remember those posters, I'll never forget.

And those posters who forced their own children into solitary confinement in their bedroom because they were were scared of catching germs from them, are monstrous.

The image of Mr Ismay from the Titanic film comes to mind. You know, the one that elbows past women and children to get into a boat. And sits cowering and snivelling while hundreds of children drown. Yep, those types are still going strong today - cringing and wringing their hands about how vulnerable they are, hiding behind children as a human shield.

Not to excuse every behaviour that anyone engaged in during that period, but important imho to point out the government deliberately tried to make people more afraid, as a matter of policy. We'll never know how many of these worst excesses might not have happened if people had been less exposed to fear based messaging.

I know a lot of this was filtered through more blameworthy practices too, like how easy targets got more abuse. The people on here gleefully telling us how they tutted at or said something to people without masks in supermarkets weren't doing it if they thought they were going to get punched, for example. Not trying to make that sound ok. Just want to acknowledge the wider context.

But its proven those masks did not reduce transmission. So you were abused by your employer and gov, and those who played the system to get out of wearing them were the smart ones.

I haven't been vaccinated either and have had covid twice, in 2021 and 2023. Both times felt horrendous for 2 days and then rapidly recovered. All my extended family have had the vaccine and all the endless boosters and it seems they've had covid annually since then, sometimes being ill for weeks. Three of my relations now have heart problems, zero problems before. They say its covid, I say its the vaccine.

That is horrific. I'm so sorry.

That is absolutely awful @taxguru

I think the main benefits to kids going forward are that WFH is now the standard with office roles so parents have much more flex and work life balance. Whether that trumps the damage – I’m not sure. My kids definitely benefited overall. They were 2 and got to spend 2 years at home with us rather than full time nursery and then started school as normal. My niece on the other hand missed year 6 and 7, which was really shit block of time to be disrupted and she struggles to this day.

There are massive effects on children coming through school now. They can't behave around people and know far less than expected for their age.

That doesn't mean that a lockdown wasn't needed to prevent contact between people during a pandemic.

It means that parents underestimate the importance and impact of schools generally. And that many should have done much more to look after and bring up their own children properly.

How should it ever be the case that being safe at home with family for an extended period of time is damaging, and the answer is just to say it shouldn't have happened and shouldn't again.

That's just a silly thing to say. Parents do not have the time or necessarily the knowledge to teach their children full time as well as work.

I bring up my DS properly, thanks. But during lockdown I still had to work full time. He was in year 7 at the time and I had to basically leave him to it whilst working. I am also a lone parent. Plus I do not have enough knowledge to teach him even if I had the time. I did not do great at school and don't have A levels or a university degree, which is why I sent him to school so a qualified teacher can do that. I have never underestimated the importance of school and teachers.

Because they didn't have their village.
Some were at home in very little space and to compound this, thought that the rules for being outside were more draconian than they were.

Some of these parents had their own stresses, vulnerable loved ones, trying to work from home, sudden reduction to income, their own health anxiety, struggles with their own loss of support network, struggles with healthy coping mechanisms being taken away and being replaced with more Netflix, more news, more alcohol and takeaways.

WFH is gradually reducing it seems and is not an option for many jobs. I think the benefits of wfh where available would still be there if the highest level of restrictions had been earlier and therefore shorter in duration.

Where wfh continues I think the better work-life balance may keep some people in specific jobs for longer.

And that many should have done much more to look after and bring up their own children properly.
How should it ever be the case that being safe at home with family for an extended period of time is damaging, and the answer is just to say it shouldn't have happened and shouldn't again.

This is just revealing your ignorance. Parents were often working full time under very pressurised conditions. Without any support networks. Super shitty to then blame them for being out in an awful position.

I can see definite downsides to many people around me working from home. I encourage my DH to go in weekly as it gives him a lift and a different perspective, but one week can slide into the next quite easily. in the job he's doing he always had the option of flexible working.

It was the counting of the customers was the most problematic for supermarkets. Even more so for a friend who works for a supermarket with a car park on the roof. As customers who turned up on foot/bicycle went through the main entrance. Customers parking on the roof go down lift - store has two lifts (which go down into the store itself), one for going down and the other for going up - they had a barrier between the two. Had a colleague on the roof and another one by the main entrance and communicated by walkie talkie about how many were queuing by lifts and main entrance, the colleague by the main entrance had a counting app on a work's tablet. Customers who parked on the roof to buy cigs were peed off of having to go through the self scan to enter the "up" lift.

My friend working in the above supermarket - when the numbers of customers allowed increased, most supermarkets had a "shop alone if you can" policy. The number of BS came from customers that insisted that they needed to shop as a couple was ridiculous. "My husband carries the cards" - why can't you carry cards? "My husband carries a basket as I have a bad back" - that's what trolleys are for. Even my DM who had back trouble got a trolley for a few items. "we don't know what to have for our evening meal" - write a list or take it in turns.

I think people forget the scenes in Italy at the very start of the pandemic. With no controls that's how things would have looked in the UK. Lockdowns also insulated a lot of the population from what was happening in hospitals and care homes.

Could lockdowns and overall management of the pandemic response have been better? - of course it could. We had a clown car government and civil contingencies planning had been underfunded and under-rehearsed for decades.

Module 8 of the Covid Inquiry will look at the impact on children and young people. This reports and inquiries this makes should allow a better analysis of the question asked by the OP.

WFH is getting more hybrid. Jobs require just being in the office 3 days over 2 weeks now. Because of this, my friend who is job hunting doesn't mind travelling a little further than the areas she would drive to work if its on site working all the time.

Often overlooked with WFH is the impact this will have on young people down the line. How do you recruit, induct, train, and develop new employees and trainees at the start of their careers?

(this is a question we're currently talking to clients about - the Tech Bro response "AI is the answer, now what was the question?" doesn't work)

Nor were essential retail workers who deal with hundreds of customers per day. Teachers - up to 150 pupils per day. Doctors and nurses - low-mid 2 figures.

My asthmatic friend who works for a supermarket wrote an e-mail to her GPs as she was not eligible for the vaccine earlier due to her age. GPs had the discretion of moving patients up groups if they were borderline. The practice moved her up to the one with life threatening medical issues.

We aren't very good at collectively talking and learning about pretty much everything in this country and herein lies the problem. Does it make much sense, for example, to provide accommodations for only one or two year groups post covid regarding exam standards when EVERY child was impacted from babies upwards. But, no, it was back to business as normal with this vague notion that it's history and children are resilient. Is an employer ten years from now going to look at the CV of someone who sat their GCSE's in 2023 and say, oh yes, I remember, that's the year group where the exams returned to their usual difficulty? There is a balance to be struck of course between the needs of all members of society, but did we get it right? I think not. There is no such thing as society, apparently, when it comes to spending money on supporting basic human needs, but then suddenly there is when it comes to profiteering from it and generating fear and conformity, which suits the elites and powerful fine and dandy.

They go to the offices/whatever to do the training and when confident, then they go to hybrid. One job I looked at requires the first 5 weeks in the office to train to use the systems, the law associated with the work etc.

I didn’t say it was for many jobs. I said office-based roles. 69% of UK businesses adopt a fully remote or hybrid model. That equates to 44% of all UK workers, compared to 14% in 2019.

There are buzzy articles when one firm or another are demanding workers back, but it’s not widespread – and in almost all cases it’s demanding workers back to an increased hybrid model as opposed to full remote or something exceptionally minimal such as 1-2 days a month.

80% of hybrid and fully remote workers report that the primary benefit is there work from life balance, and 91% (worldwide) claim it improves their lives. This will absolutely be a positive for a great many children.