To not understand why people go on about the impact of Covid lockdown on children

[PrunellaModularis]

It comes up all the time on MN and I don't get it.

They had several months off school, couldn"t see their friends or grandparents or do clubs. Then lockdown ended, back to school, friends, grandparents and clubs.

How come people say "because Covid" to explain young people's behaviour.

Disclaimer: I'm not talking abouy kids in abusive families.

Ignore poll - don't know how to disable it!

@BunnyLake

If it is his first time with a broken heart, look up the whole "first time big emotions".
It really helped my boy to explain to him that this huge grief at his first time having his heart smashed was so normal.
That EVERYONE never forgets their first heartbreak. We all remember their name clearly even after 40 years.
Counselling was absolutely invaluable to my son.
I found a lovely psychologist, a woman aged 60 like me, well used to dealing with issues with the early to mid 20's dealing with the end of university transition and heartbreak.
She really helped.
I would find someone both good and lovely and it will become his safe place.

Consider Ashwagandha and a B vitamit complex to support him and his nervous system.
They really helped my boy.
I had to hand them to him everyday!!🙄but they definitely helped regulate him.
Magnesium bisglyicerate for sleeping is great too and helped my son sleep better.
Mind yourself too.
This took a terrible toll on my health through worry about him.

Solitary confinement with a strained family dynamic at a formative time?

My youngest was in year 6, she missed the high school preparation and also time in year 7. As a consequence she never really settled at high school. As a single parent and an NHS worker I had to continue working whilst also trying to homeschool. Both my children became withdrawn, my parents would say why don't they speak? Because they have had no socialisation and spent time only with each other.

If you're going to blame screens, then how COVID lockdowns sped up how reliant schools and pretty much every other institution became reliant on screens should factor into the on-going impact of those lockdowns.

Pre-COVID, my kids had one desktop computer that was attached to a TV for all their school needs. It worked really well, even the secondary age kids didn't really need it for long in any day, they could easily rotate. Then COVID hit, 3 out of 4 of my kids were expected to be on a computer for hours a day for all of their lessons. This repeated and increased with each lockdown - first only one had online live lessons, but the others had a lot to do, second time all three had online live lessons. There is still a significant increase in AI-generated homework and computer use in general compared to pre-pandemic. While it absolutely existed before, it has dramatically increased the idea that kids should be able to teach themselves anything if they have access to the internet without adult input, and that's educational neglect. That's having far more of an impact I think than just gaming, which has been around for decades.

Then there was my oldest, who was going though a practice paper with his dad when the announcement came that exams were cancelled. He burst into tears, feeling so lost - GCSEs were built up by the school as the key to his future and for weeks he had no idea what was happening. His school was actually really good at getting lessons back straight away, but they had nothing they could tell the kids either. I remember so many adults afterwards, especially online, were telling teenagers who were upset that they were monsters, that they were heartless, that those exams that schools had been pumping up for years as pivotal to their lives, those suddenly didn't really matter, they should be glad to have time at home.

I remember my oldest in an online English lesson going over that poem that was everywhere about how great lockdown is as we all have more time, he and his peers tore it a new one as they all at least one parent who was out working, many doing longer shifts to cover for others. Instead of the quiet the poem talked about, they talked about hearing more trains and freight lorries. The teacher was really good with it, but that's where my thoughts go back to - those kids, and many of us adults, were being pushed a narrative of how we should view the lockdowns that didn't match reality and told if they felt anything negative then that meant they wanted people to die. It was a massive headfuck for some.

Yes, he and the others have had time to rebuild since, that doesn't change that the lessons learned and how education and other parts of society that have changed doesn't have a lasting impact. As others have said, the whole discussion around the importance of attendance and schools is in tatters, trust in general seems very low, and those COVID cohorts are now adults dealing with a horrible job market, rising cost of living, and many are still in very unstable situations where they're hearing again that it doesn't matter how they work, they're going to be considered the problem and should just be grateful for whatever. It's not unsurprising that many of them are struggling emotionally, if not in many other ways.

We did limit media exposure at home but we found primary school quite often discussed things such as the Manchester arena bombing that we had chosen not to bring up at home. In Covid several school parents and two neighbours were doctors so we could hardly avoid explaining in age appropriate terms.

One of my former colleagues died of Covid as did a student's grandad.

Who was trapped inside their house during lockdown? We went out for walks every day so it was certainly possible to see other people's smiling faces without masks on - yes, from 2 metres away - but that is about how far away I'd prefer a stranger to stay from my baby anyway.

I didn't say it wasn't difficult for the new parents in lockdown. I just don't believe that COVID lockdowns caused developmental delays in children who were babies at that time.

As a teacher, this definitely. Attendance has never recovered. Also it wasn't 'a few months' - it was early 2020 to end of 2022 that schools were disrupted- shut, open, shut again, crap online provision, better on line provision, no exams for 2 years in a row - where were you with your "few months"???

COVID had varying impacts on different families and some may have emerged relatively unscathed, others were traumatised as this thread shows.

What is worse for me is a wider social shift which affected adults as much as children, pushing them into an anxiety and suspicion about social interaction. COVID encouraged people to see online socialisation as normal and default and a large number of people allowed their social skills to atrophy, in some cases with a real sense of relish.

I find the “I loved lockdowns” posts really triggering, upsetting and insensitive to this day. Partly for selfish reasons: I had a horrendous lockdown and I think its really tone deaf to celebrate the fact that you enjoyed your garden when people were dying or working insane hours. But mainly because I find the fetishisation of “introversion” and encouragement to pander to every conceivable social anxiety really toxic and disturbing.

COVID gave air cover to a load of misanthropic and anxious people to convince themselves that normal social interaction was negative and unnecessary and they urged one another on into a spiralling perception that social relationships with people outside the family were suboptimal and to be avoided. Social interaction isn’t negotiable in my opinion. It’s a key part of what makes us human beings and its essential for mental health and social cohesion. I think quite a lot of our current political woes have come from this suspicion of “outsiders” which COVID fuelled.

This for me was the real lasting impact of COVID. Schoolchildren were at the sharp end of it and many of them do bear emotional scars still. But the real legacy was the wider encouragement of social atomisation.

OP you had one child, age about 15, during Covid. So this was a child who could be safely left alone at home, who could independently engage with the online learning provided by her school, who could understand the rationale for the Covid restrictions, and who didn’t have to do proper GCSEs.

I don’t think you’re really in a position to judge the impact on younger children.

Bur wgatdid your eldest see?
How old was he/she, what did they see?

Why didn't your nice not see her mother?

Why not speak to mental health experts and tell them you don’t have a clue why so many young adults are still struggling g with the impact of lockdown now.
Im sure these stretched to breaking point therapists and counsellors will value your well thought out input

Yes I find the covid doom mongers very bizarre, almost like they want to put a negative spin on very neutral events. Eg the PP who claims that her children's first words were "mask" & "handgel" and trying to make it sound like she was inflicted with some horrendous trauma. It was a totally ubiquitous feature of everyday life at that point so obviously all toddlers learning how to speak had that in their vocabulary first, alongside thousands of other everyday words.

We also had very positive memories of the lockdown, within reason. We spent loads of time with family and lots of time outdoors. When direct contact wasn't possible, we had a family group chat where everyone regularly posted all the things they were doing. We had more contact with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins during that time than after the pandemic. Everyone made an effort to stay connected and keep the family morale high. Parties and christenings were very small but all the more special.

Honestly, people in the UK had no idea how good they had it compared to many other countries. In Asia, small children had to wear mandatory masks all day, even outdoors. One Instagrammer I followed decided to move to HongKong during that time and it involved a 14day hotel quarantine with her toddler. Literally 14 days in one tiny room with a small child. What on earth can you do during that time?! But she somehow managed to pull through with good spirits.

If the OP means there are no current issues around children’s mental health, education and socialisation I think she’s obviously wrong, but I wonder whether what she means is that a lot of people think Covid was the start of the problems when many experts think that Covid exacerbated existing issues and made them impossible to ignore.

They think that smartphones and social media, and even further back than that, children no longer being out running around all day with other children, are the real cause of many mental health problems in children.

Jonathan Haidt wrote a book called the anxious generation which claims that the data actually shows that there’s a “break-point” in children’s feelings of wellbeing that began with the arrival of smartphones, and I think that seems plausible.

By that reading, the Covid lockdown did of course have negative effects, especially among vulnerable groups, but the really effect was that lockdown “broke” many children’s remaining social structures, and that’s why it’s got so much worse - it sped up what has already been happening so that huge numbers of families got to a crisis point at around the same time.

(I don’t know if this is true, and I’m sure Haidt has been discussed on here before, but it seems very plausible to me.)

Did these children have it so good? Or the kids that succumbed to EDs and other MH struggles whilst CAMHs pulled up the drawbridge or those of us with grieving elderly parents totally alone, or those of us having to work throughout whilst our children were just left sort themselves out or those in flats without gardens…. It was not some idillic banana bread making heaven for a big percentage of the country.

Data from the UK and globally indicates a significant increase in online grooming and various forms of child abuse during COVID-19 lockdown periods
. The isolation, combined with increased time spent online for education and entertainment, created what officials termed a "perfect storm" for abusers to target children, particularly during 2020-2021.
UK Parliament +4
Key Findings on Online Grooming and Abuse:

• Online Sexual Abuse Material (IWF Data):Reports of online child sexual abuse images increased by nearly 50% in the 11 weeks following the UK's first lockdown announcement in March 2020.
• Self-Generated Material: The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) saw a 77% increase in reports of "self-generated" abuse material, where children are coerced or manipulated into producing sexual images of themselves.
• Grooming Offences: Childline reported a 60% increase in contacts regarding online child sexual abuse. In the first 3 months of the 2020 lockdown, 1,220 online grooming offences were recorded by police in England and Wales.
• Platforms Involved: Instagram and Snapchat were frequently identified as platforms used in grooming crimes during this period.
• Global Surge: Europol reported that in 2020, reports of online child abuse material more than doubled globally.
• NSPCC | The UK children's charity | NSPCC +4
• Real-World Child Abuse and Neglect:Increased Risk in Homes: Children isolated with abusers faced higher risks of abuse, with the NSPCC helpline seeing a 53% increase in calls from adults worried about child abuse during the initial lockdown.
• Serious Incidents: Data from April to September 2020 showed a 27% increase in serious incident notifications (cases of serious harm or death) to local authorities in England compared to the same period in 2019.
• Domestic Abuse: There was a significant rise in children experiencing domestic abuse within their homes, with contacts to the NSPCC regarding this rising by over 50%.
• UK Parliament +1
• Factors Contributing to the Increase:Higher Online Presence: Children spent significantly more time online for school and socializing, often unsupervised.
• Lowered Detection: School closures meant teachers—often the first to notice signs of abuse—did not see children for months, resulting in many cases staying "hidden".
• Reduced Moderation: Tech firms reported a reduction in the number of human moderators available to remove harmful content, giving abusers more freedom.
• UK Parliament +4

The long-term impact of the pandemic has resulted in sustained high levels of online risk, with online grooming crimes reaching record levels in subsequent years. NSPCC | The UK children's charity | NSP

Yes and things like trips and residentials have never properly recovered in part becauseof energy and transport costs that hit pretty much as soon as we came out of Covid. The cost of a coach these days is shocking!

Utterly different from this. Certain school years will have gone through secondary without residential trips or any trips at all. Some cohorts dead much amended GCSE and A Level experiences with no or different exams. Many kids lost family and couldn't have access to regular grieving processes.

Going on a residential trip is not essential to anyone

As a secondary school teacher, it is having a bigger impact on us now than ever before. The current year 7 were about 5/6 years old when they had over a year of little to no education in some cases. This is the age when children learn how to behave at school, how to learn and how to interact with peers and school staff. The immaturity of children starting secondary school has increased massively year on year since the pandemic, and is arguably at it's peak with the current year 7 and possibly next year's too.

Well apart from geographers and linguistics.

It's an aspect of education that's been significantly downgraded, however.

Has anyone really not become a Geographer or linguist because they didn't have a weekend in Wales or France as a teenager??

Come on!

It has been downgraded due to cost, litigation and quite frankly would you want to take a bunch of kids away who have no manners or social skills?

I don't think it's helpful to take a superior attitude.

I'm not sure if your position is that COVID had no lasting impact on any children, or it did have lasting impacts in households where the parents were less amazing than you, or both simultaneously?

Because we are social beings and for children, especially older children/teens they were in a key stage for developing social relationships and at a stage where relationships outside the family unit are very important. Because there is a clear correlation with the lock downs and mental health in young people.
It was a lot more than a couple of months. There were 2 full lock downs across two separate school years, as well as restrictions outside of the lockdowns that impacted on the ability to develop socially.
This is such an ignorant post. I personally did great during lockdown, I loved being able to work at home and not deal with the usual rushed lifestyle but it's very clear that it was a struggle for most children and young people and a lot of adults.

Well don't resort to name calling then!

It is obviously multi faceted

But I believe there is a lot of scare mongering, a lot of dramatics and a lot of people accepting that since covid that is their lot and not doing anything about it!

It was 6 years ago

Aw, most of my students aren't that bad and I did a residential (only one night admittedly) as recently as February. It's just got harder and harder to organise and staff and we're super conscious some parents can't afford anything however many bursaries etc there are.