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!

OP will probably blame the parents for dying.

You really can't engage in a discussion, can you @EwwPeople ?

(edited to add, wrong post quoted) The bitter irony is that a lockdown lasting months on end was only possible because of the prevalence of the internet, and smart devices. Even ten years previously, it would have been tricky, and the government would have been under much more pressure to restore normality sooner. Instead, the “new normal” 🤮 was enabled by smart devices, so that children and adults were imprisoned at home, with oodles of time on their smart devices.

I have engaged plenty , thank you very much. Interestingly, none of my posts explaining why children might’ve been affected and engaging in discussions deserved a reply from you, but by being snarky I got 3/4 today.

My DDs were both impacted by COVID, mainly because I was very ill with it in 2020 and developed Long COVID. DD2 was afraid I was going to die. They’re both adopted, so obviously that played a part in her anxiety as well.

I suppose COVID had more of an impact on children who were already vulnerable.

I truly thought people were being faux incredulous yesterday at how a toddler could have possibly been unsettled during lockdown, there were also comments saying if a child struggled it must be all the parents fault which is nice.

To give more context about my comments, pre lockdown my toddler was used to seeing grandparents, aunts uncles and cousins most weekends, we are from a big extended family and his relationships with grandparents in particular are very close and he was very used to seeing them often. Nursery every morning mon-fri was also a part of his routine and we went to the same parks, soft play places regularly. My dh was a key worker, my work and nursery stopped and then me and 3 year old were basically on our own with all our usual places shut. And he noticed, people on this thread saying a 3 year old would have no clue, have no clue about 3 year olds. They are little people, not empty headed.
I did my best ordering finger paints off amazon, banana bread, taking him for the daily walk etc.. but he was frustrated, I got frustrated some days and he missed his grandparents terribly, one of whom was clinically vulnerable so it took even longer for them to see one another again. There was no way for me as a parent to make sure he was 100% fine with lockdown, certain things you just have no control over.

Anyway, fast forward, he's now 9, forgotten lockdown mostly and we've had a good parents evening recently, however there are certain little things about him which I sometimes wonder if it's because he was really confused and felt out of control at 3. I can never know this for sure but if another parent told me they thought a child had really suffered as a result of lockdown I would be inclined to listen at least and not just completely dismiss it. Especially for children who may have been disadvantaged in certain ways anyway and then lockdown just compounded those problems, for example a child who needed identified help with social skills and then nursery closed.
There will be academic studies about this I'm sure.

We had zero work sent from school in the first lockdown. So I had two dc, different ages, and I was trying to work full time. Someone explain how that cannot have an impact?

The January lockdown was zoom lessons. But we didn’t have enough devices for both, we borrowed tablets from school. And then I had to help them get logged on (while still working full time), and answer tech questions. And then our internet would go down or slow because of us all using it.

I homeschooled 2 children through Covid, their parent were very lucky to have me 40 hours per week so with school being shut I took it on. We didn’t allow any radio or live tv to be on, we didn’t discuss any of it in front of the children. One of their parents would take them out for a walk every day to give us all a break but other than that, we got on with it. They had absolutely no negative repercussions from that time and in fact, the eldest went back to school and was put up a group in academic ability. It wasn’t the experience of the vast majority of children. But I do think that Covid is massively still used as a reason and an excuse now by many.

I really feel for the kids who had parents glued to computers in tiny flats, with no gardens. That would have been so unpleasant, and a whole other ballgame than my kids’ experience. New mums as well, what a sad thing to be parent for the first time and miss out on all that support and comfort of friends and family visiting.

No kid should have ever been told about people dying, none of them should have had access to the news or adult conversation about it. And the teens that were affected (my stepchildren were that age group) have now had 6 years to move past it all. I suspect those who hadn’t either would have had issues anyway, or had parents who didn’t keep enough of a lid on it at home, or who didn’t deal with it and move on either.

Some kids had classmates with families in other countries that locked down before us , so word and worries spread.
Some kids were in keyworker groups and parents had no control over what was overheard/discussed by classmates/staff.
Some kids were too old to not be able to access news themselves.
Some kids had parents and relatives sick with COVID, in hospital with COVID , dying of COVID. How do you keep that away from them?
Some kids were too old to be easily placated/distracted , without a proper explanation, especially giving how disruptive their lives were.

I have seen a lot of ill-informed posts on Mumsnet, but I really think this one could take the all-time crown.

On what planet could it NOT have affected children and young people?

Can you…can you think of any link between those two things, though?

It wasn't a few months it was March to August of one school year (including no summer holiday activities) and then January and February of the next school year. My 6yr old ds as an only child didn't play with another child for the first lock down for around four months... it was weird. He is ok, and did bounce back, but he did sort of lose his childlikeness and become a bit too adult in the first lockdown despite DH and I nearly killing ourselves keeping two ft jobs going remotely and homeschooling and trying to be fun playmates.

My neice walked out of primary school with no notice in March and had to start secondary in the August under social distancing with absolutely zero transition. She is also ok, but I'd understand if she wasn't.

This is true. We couldn't have had a policy like 2020 lockdown before a critical mass of stuff was online. Probably needed majority smartphone ownership, which I think was about 2013?

As a teacher and a mother, I think the pandemic broke something in society which hasn't been fully repaired. Children are different now, more wary, cynical and anxious. My own now 19yo suffered because of it, without a doubt.

Exactly this. When these young people who were children at the time realise just how much the government fucked them over, they will never trust politicians or government again. They will probably also feel “cry wolf” syndrome, and will refuse to take any future “safety” message seriously. They saw how easily the government can snatch EVERYTHING away, on a whim, and use the media to panic the public into supporting the move. I certainly feel this way. For that matter, I’ve loathed and distrusted politicians since the day Sir Tony fucking Bliar was elected, but 2020 was the final nail in the coffin of any trust I will ever have for government, in my life.

Clearly some children (and adults) will have been impacted long term by Covid but all I'm reading here is my child's doing fine but they could've been affected!

Well, they might have been upset/confused at the time - not being able to see granny, go to preschool or the park or prom - but their inbuilt resilience got them through just as it has done for young people since time began.

Resilience is for systems. Compassion is for people. I'd suggest you build some.

So far on this thread we’ve had:

Restrictions were only in place for a few weeks
Kids weren’t badly affected
…and if they were it was their parents’ fault for projecting their own anxiety onto them
Small children don’t need any social contact other than their parents
’Well, MY child was fine!’
Kids are resilient

I just need ‘schools aren’t childcare!’ to complete my bingo card.

Resilience is for systems

That's where you've been going wrong.

I was raised by a WW2 child. She was born pre-war and grew up not knowing what peace was. She was bombed out twice in fairly close succession around the age of 5. When the war ended, there was a decade of gradually fading rationing before the final restrictions ended. Her father who came home was not the man who went off to war, permanently damaged by trauma and injury.
Generally, she's ticked along fairly decently for the past 80 years... apart from the hoarding disorder that's really caught up with her in the last 25 years triggered by trauma and scarcity.

Should she have been more resilient?

Covid lockdown was very much not like her war experiences. Ironically her happy memories of that phase of life are about her extended family pulling together to get through incredibly difficult times, precisely what was made illegal in 2020/21.

My DCs' granny lived abroad and had a life-limiting condition when we had our last scheduled family visit in Oct '19. 2020 was a write off. By a margin of one week with the extended restrictions we managed to travel to see her in 2021... well, due to care home restrictions only DH was allowed in. By 2022, she was ailing rapidly mentally and physically. By the time carehome restrictions finally eased, she was weeks away from death and unable to recognise her grandchildren even if they weren't radically grown in 2.5 years. They saw her in her open coffin where by the wonders of make-up and clothing, the undertakers made her look impressively like herself as the DCs remembered her. DH felt it would be more traumatic to the DCs to see her last dying weeks at age 9 & 11 so radically deteriorated from how they remembered her from when they were 6 & 8.
Fortunately for DH, he did see her more as solo travel was logistically simpler to arrange last minute for 1-2 nights when she was unpredictably moving between home/ hospital/ carehomes.

The general effect of prolonged restrictions and our long distance families is that our extended family connections have weakened as several branches of family have had lifestage gear changes and that's created fractures rather than gentler, organic transitions.

My DCs aren't traumatised by this, but they have lost a significant chunk of access to extended family life at the age where the strongest memories are often made before getting to the more individualistic transition towards teenagehood, and they've lost meaningful bonds with family because they couldn't have in-person experiences for so long.

Another layer beyond legal restrictions was the effect on peoples' confidence, additional barriers they put up and just the general level of burn-out across the population. Quite a few of my extended family members were risk averse, then in 2021-22 I hit a burn-out phase from the effort of trying to keep my DCs' life ticking over as normally as possible, having my routines eradicated or switched on/ off at short notice for 18m then being hit by a series of bereavements in 2022.

My friends had experiences such as trying to WFH with a toddler on their lap and a young child doing school work at home. We burned out from different triggers, and had nothing spare to really reconnect and add extras beyond regular routines until 2023 when there'd finally been a run of stability.

The effects of prolonged and rapidly shifting restrictions were complex, and some quite subtle and varied from individual to individual and it took a long time to feel a confidence in stability again. We didn't end up with that "New Normal" thank goodness but for many the axis of normal was long term or permanently shifted by a few degrees. For children of any age, their development stage and life experience was different coming out of it than going into it.

So much depends on context. If COVID happened when we were in the position on 6 years earlier, say, it would have been awful and really impactful. We would have been in a 2-bed flat with a 2 year old and a 5 year old . I probably would have had to give up work to look after 2yo and desperately attempt to consolidate what oldest was learning about reading, writing and maths. It would have been stressful as hell.

But when it did happen, kids were in Y4 and Y7, old enough to understand what was happening, not in the most super-crucial years for learning and to do Zoom lessons OK, and by then we were in a 4 bed house. So I don't think it's had a massive effect on my kids, but if it had happened in the previous scenario I think they might have both been left with lingering negative effects.

Should she have been more resilient?

We're not talking about the war. There's no comparison.

I'm not suggesting that lockdown wasn't challenging and I appreciate some of the thoughtful perspectives but life is hard - my mum died when we were kids - and we need to be able to guide our children through tough times (if we're lucky enough to be around for them) not go on about being burnt out.

Please tell me more about where I'm wrong.

Resilience is about structures, processes, routines, and environments that can absorb shock, adapt, and continue functioning. Systems should be resilient because they don’t have inner lives.

Compassion acknowledges that humans have limits, and that those limits are not flaws but features.

Please note, this is not just for children but for people. If you're treating people like systems, you're the one going wrong. Not me.

"I just need ‘schools aren’t childcare!’ to complete my bingo card"

Well some? schools stayed open for key worker children throughout the Easter holidays in the first lockdown literally for childcare purposes...

Wow!

We had a great lockdown. Kids all came home and as a big family we spent lots of quality time together.

However, reengaging with the wider world has been a big issue for the two who were still at school/uni. The older one missed pretty much all in-person uni experience even when lockdown finished because the uni in question decided not to bring back f2f until much later. They have pretty much recovered although definitely changed in personality and health.

The younger one has multiple issues. I doubt they will ever be the person they were before covid.