To think that everyone who told those with preschool children in 2020/21 to get a puddlesuit and that lockdown wasn’t that bad needs to read this

[manysummersago]

BBC link

Reading the above has made me feel so angry and sad at what was done to the babies and toddlers of this country, and I can’t believe that we let it happen, quite honestly.

Sorry, haven't rtft.

I think the lockdowns were necessary but have also done massive damage to whole cohorts of children and young people. Both can be true, and arguing about lockdown at this stage does nothing to help anyone.

We have small DC but luckily no concerns. DC1 turned 2 right at the start of the first lockdown. She became very wary of strangers and other children during lockdown, even though all the parents we met on our walks quickly began encouraging any possible interaction. Fortunately, her nursery reopened in July 2020 and never closed again, so she bounced back quickly and I think is pretty much unaffected. I worry for those in her age group who weren't in childcare and so missed out on acquiring social skills as the routes that SAHP would naturally go down just weren't available. I think that age group is going to struggle with behaviour and social skills going forwards.

Youngest was born in July 2020 and luckily was a healthy baby with no feeding problems etc and so is I think entirely untouched by the pandemic. She had a bit of a charmed start in truth, with her dad home every day. I missed being able to get out to groups and see other parents but it wasn't a big deal second time around as I already had support structures in place. I really, really feel for anyone who had a first baby or a baby with health problems at this time as it must have been extraordinarily difficult.

Neither of them spent much time around adults in masks so I've no concerns there. I would have been very worried if the nursery staff were wearing them.

I'm a university lecturer and now that our delivery is largely back to normal we're having huge problems - after online teaching, online assessment and assigned grades, our students just don't get it. Plagiarism and collusion are massively up, performance is down - they don't know how to study and have hugely unrealistic expectations for the academic help they should get at this level. I think this will take a good few years to work through.

We should acknowledge these problems, we should fund programmes to combat it. That doesn't need to be a bunfight about lockdown. That's over and done, we need to come together on picking up the pieces.

What was the alternative? Do nothing at all and let elderly people and the vulnerable die? The country was being ravaged by an unknown virus and people were dying in huge numbers. Little Johnny being a bit behind on his phonics isn't that important in the grand scheme of things.

My dc falls into that age group and has some speech delay but they'll catch up.

•Even those with engaged none working parents at home singing rhymes etc will have missed out on normal development opportunities like playing with peers, interacting with people - give the lady in the shop the money for the sweets type interaction of past has been impossible - she’s in a mask behind Perspex and it’s card only.•

But that is repairable - we've done all of that as soon as we could, and the lockdowns were in bursts - there were plenty of opportunities after as the first lockdown was eased and in my area, plenty of baby groups were formed to run outside - the NCT ran free walk and talk sessions, local mums created their own groups on Facebook. We had a pretty normal summer in 2020 - we didn't even have to wear masks everywhere. The second one was harder as it lasted longer through the cold miserable winter, but even then, we still went to the supermarket, the nursery was open, and support groups were allowed to continue.

I agree that opportunities were limited, but they didn't completely go away over the past two years.

I was out somewhere and a mum handed a small girl something to eat and the child freaked out. Mum was reassuring her she’d washed her hands etc it was fine. The mum explained girl is obsessed with hand gel/germs. There are going to be so many children with issues like this if all they have ever known is don’t touch, wash hands repeatedly. Normal things like all sitting around a table at snack time and taking a biscuit off a plate are alien to them.

@BeforeGodAndAllTheFish

What an awful thing to say! Did you also do 6+ days a week shift work in an acute NHS trust throughout like some of us? Whilst having multiple children at home? Do your children have no specific health or learning difficulties that you couldn't get to speak to a professional about let alone get treatment or support?

Sorry potty training is the responsibility of the parents - am completely bewildered as to why the pandemic has aaffected that

YANBU.

This was eminently foreseeable too, but anyone who questioned it was condemned as selfish, and a granny killer.

People should be ashamed.

@BustopherPonsonbyJones

Without any judgement (as everyone was struggling), many of these problems are also due to a lack of parental involvement and interaction with their children and perhaps an over reliance on nurseries to ‘parent’. Exposing nursery workers to Covid when we knew nothing about the virus and before vaccinations would have been unforgivable. Why should they have been put at risk at a level no one else was facing? We are now seeing the consequences of dealing with a novel virus and there will be many, many negative effects. In this scenario, I prefer to see my nursery colleagues alive and hopefully well whilst accepting this had some impact on young children. The thing that is unforgivable is if we don’t provide catch ups and interventions for children. We also need to accept that this costs money,

This. There had been reports prior to covid that young children were starting school unable to hold cutlery,not toilet trained and look at the FSM debacle. Sure Start centres providing parenting classes and other support had funding pulled by the Tories way before Covid. I will never forgive them for decimating libraries. Mobile phones also relevent. Every park/ playgroup has parents sat there staring at their phones.

Cornishgem1975 it’s repairable if there’s a recognition of what has been lost and value it used to provide. So many volunteer groups haven’t restarted or are still restricted. It’s great your area has lots but in some areas lots of things haven’t restarted. Volunteers have left, new cleaning conditions imposed by church hall too onerous etc. It’s easy to dismiss it as only mums and tots/brownies etc but they all help children develop skills.

YANBU.
What was unforgivable was the scare mongering once we had an idea of where we stood. Yes at first it was very worrying, very scary and I don’t think many people disagreed with the first lockdown.
But we had and still have models being put out into the media which grossly overestimated the figures. Every time the government made a progressive change, scientists would come forward proclaiming that we would see 100,000 deaths a day, they presented these models like fact. It’s scared the shit out of everyone and totally skewed our ability to analyse the risk properly.

My nursery opened up again late summer 2020 and it stayed open, we had a good few isolations and it wasn’t easy to always navigate the rules but I am so glad that they did their best to stay open. My lockdown baby has done amazing, I don’t see any issues at all but I know this is because of the nursery.
Both me and my DP work full time and the times where we had to have kids off isolating were so hard, I can’t imagine how it has been for those who were home schooling or didn’t have open nurseries.

Yes with hindsight it’s easy to say “we should have done XYZ” but it’s true that we did have far more information and that the data didn’t support the additional lock downs, rules of 6, tiers etc - they were just fucking making it up after the first one. And we know that they were because THE RULE MAKERS DIDNT EVEN FOLLOW THE RULES

All you need to know is that the people putting the rules out didn’t even follow it - because they had access to the data that allowed them to manage their own risks. We did not, we had endless agenda and scaremongering

Those weren’t really the options because very few children would have died from Covid - many kids have now had it anyway and the number of children who have died from it is tiny.

We know this to be true now, two years on. But at the time we didn’t know what the effect on children would be. So would you have risked their lives?

I think people forget the early days of the pandemic. A new virus about which we knew next to nothing was sweeping towards us. Bodies were being stored in boxes in the street in parts of the world. Once we did know what it was, we had no effective defences against it. I have issues with decisions taken by the government at times (often they took action too late, which meant measures had to be prolonged). But the initial move to keep people apart so that the speed of spread could be controlled saved hundreds, thousands of lives, and meant we didn’t have to pick and choose who to save with hospital treatment. Because that’s what it would have meant, before vaccines.

I'm a bit sceptical about babies and toddlers being "surrounded" by adults wearing masks for most of their lives - no parents wear masks at home, and very few adults in nursery/preschool settings have been wearing masks. Of course children have seen adults in masks, but it's not been most people most of the time.

I don't get this either. My DC were both in nursery when this started, older one started school Sept 2020 and younger one still in nursery. Nursery staff wear see-through masks at pick-up and drop-off. No masks in the nursery. Teachers wore masks a bit more but not all the time. Cafes etc weren't closed for that long and meeting friends and family was possible outside for ages and in small groups for longer. All unmasked.

@BustopherPonsonbyJones

Without any judgement (as everyone was struggling), many of these problems are also due to a lack of parental involvement and interaction with their children and perhaps an over reliance on nurseries to ‘parent’. Exposing nursery workers to Covid when we knew nothing about the virus and before vaccinations would have been unforgivable. Why should they have been put at risk at a level no one else was facing? We are now seeing the consequences of dealing with a novel virus and there will be many, many negative effects. In this scenario, I prefer to see my nursery colleagues alive and hopefully well whilst accepting this had some impact on young children. The thing that is unforgivable is if we don’t provide catch ups and interventions for children. We also need to accept that this costs money,

Odd post. Of course working parents rely on nursery to care for children while they're working. If they didn't need it, they wouldn't pay hundreds/thousands of pounds per month for it.

There's some funny views on here as to what parents working from home were doing or should have been doing with their children during lockdown - singing, talking, reading, going for walks.

Well, many weren't. They were on Zoom calls or answering emails all day. Because they needed to do their jobs. That was their priority. Meanwhile, their children were being ignored or watching TV. Of course these children have suffered. Turns out parents can't split themselves in two.

Look, nobody hates puddlesuit smugness more than me, but that article says the children are "just behind" where they would expect. There is no need for hand wringing and soul searching. They will catch up.

And I am willing to bet the puddlesuit brigade's kids are doing better than average.

@BeforeGodAndAllTheFish

Everything in that article is just bad, lazy parenting. Nothing to do with lockdown. Everything to do with bad, lazy parents not doing what they should have.

My children thrived during lockdown. They returned to school way ahead of where they should have been. Because I actually made an effort.

Good for you but some of us were battling lockdown and terminally ill partners with very little support from anyone else including the NHS. We actually made an effort too but sometimes life throws utter shit at you that is beyond your control.

@ClaudiaWankleman

So, presumably you are a public health expert and know better than me - which mitigations would you have chosen, given we knew nothing about the virus? What would their effect have been?

Well you asserted something and now can't provide any evidence that there were no other options, so the ball is really in your court. Nonetheless, I can think that we might have:

• Given special dispensation for young children to interact with their peers, especially by allowing pre-school care to continue, even if we reduced the frequency.
• Investigated or tried to understand the potential effects on children earlier than this and provided better guidance to parents and families to mitigate.
• Not included children in the rule of 6.

Germs spread faster between toddlers than anyone else. So option 1 is a bad idea. Children have siblings and if parents of only children were concerned they have peer interaction they could face time or meet outdoors or temporarily share accommodation with another family with a child - lots of options individual could have chosen within the restrictions.

Options 2. Seriously? Parents need to be told that speaking to their children and playing with their children and allowing their children to watch ceebeebees and talk to extended family and friends on FaceTime is a good idea to improve their vocabulary and social skills. How did we survive when nursery was not the norm?!

Option 3. See option 1.

I remember people (family and MN) questioning me sending my 2 year old back to nursery in lockdown 2 and particularly 3 (Jan 2021). Damn right we sent him, for every available minute of his 3 days a week. He's just about managed to maintain social skills because of it, now 3 and a half. But he's been moved up into preschool early because the lower preschool kids (2-3.5) who were under 1 when this started are requiring so much more individual attention than in previous years.

Not at all @Goldbar but nobody is working every hour of the day.

As I've already said, I work full time but still find time to do that stuff with my kids. Doesn't have to be done all day every day, 30 mins of reading, a 20 min walk at the end of the day? Find it hard to think nobody can find the time for that and if they can't, maybe they need to adjust their priorities.

@Lesina

We allowed so much to happen; collective insanity. The amount of harm done to the population is immeasurable and there are still people out there calling from restrictions to be brought back. Absolute madness.

Absolutely

The first couple of lockdowns made sense but there was one point where you could go to a football stadium in a huge crowd but a child wasn’t allowed a birthday party. I think my eldest really missed out on parties etc and was a bit anxious when they started up again as he wasn’t sure what was involved. School also seemed to delight in banning parents from anywhere near the building.

Not sure why potty training is delayed though really. Health visitors should definitely have continued to assess children. Lots of SEN went undiagnosed and services can’t catch up.

I've taught nursery children for thirty two years. Rest assured they were referring to the bin as a trash can and diapers as nappies way before lockdown.

@TheYearOfSmallThings

Look, nobody hates puddlesuit smugness more than me, but that article says the children are "just behind" where they would expect. There is no need for hand wringing and soul searching. They will catch up.

And I am willing to bet the puddlesuit brigade's kids are doing better than average.

Exactly - kids will soon catch up but the idea parents needed telling is patronising. Parents who couldn’t do everything are a reality because there was a pandemic - their kids will soon catch up. Lots of doctors children are in the same boat.

@TheYearOfSmallThings

Look, nobody hates puddlesuit smugness more than me, but that article says the children are "just behind" where they would expect. There is no need for hand wringing and soul searching. They will catch up.

And I am willing to bet the puddlesuit brigade's kids are doing better than average.

Exactly - kids will soon catch up but the idea parents needed telling is patronising. Parents who couldn’t do everything are a reality because there was a pandemic - their kids will soon catch up. Lots of doctors children are in the same boat.

@CornishGem1975

Quite *@Fritilleries*

I get quite irked that my toddler is almost expected to be damaged or disadvantaged when he's not. Quite the opposite. Compared to my older children, he's thrived.

Some children who are now showing signs of shyness, or speech impairment, or who were slow to learn things may well have had these things going on without lockdown. I had a shy, clingy fussy toddler who was very late to walk - I don't have a pandemic to blame that on, it's just the way he was.

Lockdown was shit but not all children have suffered because of it.

I agree. I have a just turned three year old. While I have to say when the restrictions eased he was initially a little hesitant about new people and situations now he is thriving. He is the most confident, outgoing child you could wish to meet. We did loads of activities at home though and he has an older brother which obviously helped.

@Spudyoulikeit As mentioned earlier - cuts to the health visiting service were made long before covid was a thing. It was already struggling.