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!

I wasn't the one who called you Mary Poppins.

It is indeed multi-faceted, which is why the academic research is showing the longlasting impacts.

It's psychologically comforting for some people to minimise it, that itself is another long lasting impact.

It was more than a few months for most children. Some will have faired better than others depending on their own circumstances. Not the only thing to impact on children's behaviour, but will have had an impact for some.

Children lost routine which many thrived on.
Children started new schools without the normal support giving during transition.

Children lost the interaction with teachers and friends that they were used to which may have impacted on social skills.
A lot of children would have been worried about the health of family members.
Children weren't able to learn in the same way, so for many educational development could have been impacted.

Teachers did lessons online/sent work home, but not all parents were able to do the work with them/give the support needed, especially for younger children. Teachers wouldn't have been able to monitor the children, pick up on issues that they may have normally picked up on.

What a silly little petty comment. This thread is about things that shaped experiences during that time. I mention an important element of the experience that wasn't available to certain cohorts.

There will be a small number of children and adults adversely affected after 4 years. For those the catalyst was covid. They may or may not have been triggered by other life events.

This is MN though, where people come looking for support when they aren't coping, but it then becomes the echo chamber.
If parents struggled during covid, it followed their kids would be more prone.
It was a shit time but how the aftermath was dealt with on a societal and personal level determines the vast majorities resilience to the effects.

I know 2 teens and a early 20s whose parents say covid was devastating.

Teen 1- both parents have MH issues, its a toxic relationship between them, parental alienation to father. But Teen is suffering because of lockdown..go figure
Teen 2 - immature Teen, poor boundaries from parents, di anything to avoid him 'kicking off' , he wants to be 'homeschooling' although neither parents have the education or financial means to do so.
Early 20s- spoilt youngest child in family, no work ethic, wouldn't have got any gcse regardless of education disruption, as it was got 1 based on teacher evaluation. Admits he doesn't want a job as he wants to game all day. Been sacked or resigned before getting sacked from every job.

Ok small sample but each set of parents blame covid. Where does covid stop and individual responsibility start?
I know this thread has caused a lot of emotions but maybe it does need airing, if anything to highlight the need for MH intervention and parental help.

But what about those children who have never been, never will go on a residential due to their parents not being able to afford it, pretty sure our parents never went on residentials and it didn't do them any harm

I believe it was my post .
I absolutely was not making out her weak point was due to covid , my point was it didn't help missing almost a year of education.
I worked throughout and it's not my strongest subject either to have helped her with, i only mentioned it because she said it to me yesterday before i even saw this thread .
As i said my child did not suffer whatsoever in lock down she loved it but too many children didn't have the same experience and it will have had negative consequences sadly.

It's a shame that there are so many argumentative goady people on mumsnet, it could be so much nicer .

One thing I find a bit confusing is people talking about children missing years of school. The average amount of school children missed from lockdown was 60-65 days of school, which is about 12-13 weeks. Some missed more, some less, but that's the approximate average. It ended 5 years ago. Many school age children now weren't even born yet in lockdown or were tiny babies. Theres no indication that the school children born after lockdown are having any less issues than the ones who experienced it. Or that the children who didn't miss any school due to having families who were key workers etc are having any less issues.

All ours missed way more than this

I think the pandemic accelerated and exacerbated a lot of trends that were already occurring in society. Some children will have bounced back, others will have been much more profoundly affected. Personally, I don’t think we’ve processed what happened over the 2020-2021 period, and the consequences, as a society.

My younger DC was a baby (now year 1). A child in his class who was born prematurely has a significant speech delay, possibly related to the fact that their family were so anxious about giving them Covid that they wore masks around them for the first year of their life.

Also - the current Reception were born in 2021/2022. Every school year above them will have had their early years affected by it, from the current Year 1 who were babies when the pandemic hit, through to the current Year 6 who were in reception.

For our older DC, it significantly delayed an autism assessment as their difficulties were put down to the pandemic at one point and brushed off.

Because working full-time from home with primary aged children was hell on earth for each one of us. It was impossible to do anything well and the DC missed out on schooling, socialising, activities. Not everyone was able to spend their time home-schooling and taking nice walks in the park. My kids were neglected. They were fed and kept safe but they were very much left to entertain themselves on their own all day every day. That has had an impact.

I think its exaggerated tbh, children who were very small at the time just saw it as normal, and in fact when I was a child playgroups etc weren't around, it was completely normal to be at home pretty much all the time until you started school, there wasnt even a proper playground where i live. I think the elderly were far more affected by it, both my mum and my mil never really went out again after lockdown, they completely lost their confidence, and they were the lucky ones, having family around to help them cope. I am not saying it was easy for people with small dc, but most people just got on with it.

My daughter (7 at the time) was happy and outgoing before the lockdowns. She loved Brownies and was so excited to go every week and had a small group of close friends at school.

Nowadays she has selective mutism and social anxiety. I can’t go back in time and rerun her childhood without Covid, but I think that missing out on socialisation at such a formative time definitely did not help. Six months may be a short time for an adult, but it’s a long time for a child to be out of school. And that was just the first lockdown. Even after the second lockdown, in autumn 2021, the whole class used to get sent home if one child tested positive for Covid.

She didn’t see her friends for months as it was against the law to meet in groups and in any case playgrounds were closed. We will never get that time back.

Try getting an appointment with a child psychiatrist or child psychologist. Even with private health care it takes months, with CAMHS it’s years. It wasn’t great pre Covid but it’s much much worse now. The whole system is creaking under the strain.

@MyCatPrefersPeaches Being born prematurely significantly increases the risk of speech delays, so it’s a bit of a stretch to blame parents wearing masks in that case. Children born after lockdowns and masking ended are also showing increased rates of speech and other developmental delays. Research has shown that exposure to Covid in utero is one factor that significantly raises the risk of some developmental delays. Childhood Covid infections have also been linked to higher risks of various health problems, including mental health difficulties. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/utero-covid-exposure-linked-brain-changes-developmental-delays-anxiety-and-depression
There are bound to be plenty of other contributing factors too, such as increased poverty from the cost of living crisis in recent years, school environments that just don’t work well for many children, as well as all the failings of cahms. Mental health provision for children (and adults) in this country is an absolute disgrace.
I think lockdowns have been a useful scapegoate for too many societal problems for far too long now. Lots of children are really struggling at the moment, and we ought to be investigating all the ongoing factors causing the issues and doing something about them, as well as providing better support to all the children who need it, which would of course include any children who are struggling due to lockdowns, but I think thats going to be unusual at this stage.

"As a teacher, this definitely. Attendance has never recovered."

It's common to blame this on persistent absence, but part of it is due to more genuine illness at least some of which is persistent re- infection with COVID...

Because they were scared shitless. They weren’t allowed outside or to see anyone and was constantly told people are dying. And no matter how much you tried to protect them from that, some of it still would have got in. Put yourself in their shoes they must have been terrified.

Focussing on one element of my reply is completely undermining what I'm saying overall. Please just stop picking one element and having a go.

Also, to point out what's screamingly obvious, this is not about other generations. Even if it was, we mid sixties people did go on trips as did my significantly older sibling. For my parents they were wartime children and - if they were still here - they could tell you all about their traumatic experiences.

Re finances - DSs school (state comp) helps less well off parents making it possible for all in the cohort to go on residentials. So you're not even accurate in relation to our experience with your sweeping statements

Yes, this. Its get wired into their mental sofware. Far easier and deeper then into adults mature brains and bodies.

I remember my DS (9 at the time and ann only) asking me in tears to ask his friends mums if any of them would connect online with him as he’d never done that up to then, he was desperate for company (and we were working). My heart broke for him.

There are so many variables, but young people at transition points of schooling or development stage seem to have come off harder as a collective than those at more stable stages.

My then y4-5 came off better. He'd fortunately just got his range of ND diagnoses so swerved the exacerbated delays. His school didn't begin phasing back to normal routines until into 2022. The extended barriers that school put up to normal routines such as parents evenings made it easy for the school to mask that they were ignoring pofessional reccommendations about his needs and transition. He's done well at getting back to normal functional social routines and I made the most of temporary relaxations between lockdowns and got him out and about as much as possible. He managed to return to normal and activities and long term is doing well.

My then y2-3 was hit harder. He really missed social normality. By June 2020 with no school on the horizon until September, he was depressed from lack of interraction with his peers. In the winter lockdown, he felt taunted by the sight of half his class in online lessons, meanwhile from the garden we could hear the children of key workers allowed to play together at break and lunch time on the school playground. He was y5 before he really made personal friends. His diagnosis of dyslexia was delayed by time out of school and then "covid delays" being used to explain his difficulties. He's still on a waiting list for ADHD/ autism assessment even under right to choose. Local waiting lists are 3 years compared to DS1's 15m.
In the grand scheme of things he is still doing well, but he has been disadvantaged on earlier interventions compared to his brother.

At a cohort level both his class/ year group and the y8s at my school as a cohort are really struggling with social skills. It's not every child of course, but a significant cluster in each class (that then has a knock on effect on every other class member) that is both socially immature and by the joys of early exposure to social media and short form content too streetwise (or so they think) for their own good. This is a city-wide problem and is throwing up all kinds of safeguarding issues. It's not exclusive to this year group, but they are particularly bad. Although y7 behind them have their difficulties too (y1-2 lockdowns)

As time has passed it's not as simple as Covid lockdowns and lengthy social restrictions (many beyond the legal requirement) being the sole cause now, but is a significant aggravating factor, and the economy, health and education systems and individuals haven't had the capacity to rectify the difficulties affecting a population put under simultaneous stress. Some of the temporary coping strategies such as giving young children phones and social media to occupy them through lockdowns and keep in touch with friends when it was illegal to see them for months at a time have created equally as potent problems.

If someone voluntarily stayed home and avoided human interaction with all but immediate family for months on end you would say they were mentally ill. Lockdown mimicked mental illness and exacerbated or triggered it in many many people.

In my youth groups of same age and catchment, the one that used the permited windows of lighter restrictions to meet outdoors and have alternating indoor bubbles/ online kept better routines and progression than the one that was remote-only for 13 months.

The restrictions around logistics of organising residentials meant that we held back from organising them until they were removed. That meant that we lost 2020, 2021 and a major chunk of 2022. That was a massive jump in the chain of peer experience and role modeling. The oldest children were learning and re-learning the ropes alongside the younger children. They also hadn't had the experience through school either.

On a similar theme, the progression of young people to young leaders, and young leaders to adults was also broken. That's alongside the loss of adult leaders from changes of circumstance or chance to retire away. Opportunities for young people to ping back to what they did before did not necessarily occur even if they had the appetite for it.

My two loved lockdown. They were year 7 & 8 at the time. Did bugger all in homeschooling until the later lockdowns when the schools did actual online classes. It was a lovely summer and I bought an above ground pool. We spent most of our time outside. We live rurally too so they could clear off to canal and the fields when allowed out, They both did well in GCSE and are doing A Level. So for some it was a great memory for them. Having an extended summer break. Didn’t affect them socially or academically. I know it’s not the same for all but it was ok for some of us if I’m honest.

Who was daft enough to tell their kids that? There are always viruses that could kill us. Why not tell your kids that Covid kills some old and clinically vulnerable people so we're locking down, wearing masks and washing our hands to try to protect them.

The catastrophising on this thread illustrates why some children were impacted.

They missed their nursery graduation?? Their nativity??