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.

And also in physical development - crawling, walking and perhaps related to that also greater obesity.

To blame things like this on lockdown is ridiculous and is indicative of neglectful parenting.

Children turning two years old will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly," the Ofsted briefing said.

Again where are the parents in this? The accent thing, talking like cartoons, where are the parents? We live in Ireland but I have an English accent, guess what accent my kids had as little ones? English because I spoke and interacted with them they learnt to speak from me.

I'm sure some children have suffered as have some adults but a lot of what this article shows is lack of engagement from parents. It really shouldn't be up to nurseries to teach children to walk and talk ffs.

Kids were thrown under the bus to save 98 year olds.
I thought it was an act of insanity all along and, honestly, quietly broke the rules throughout 🤷🏼‍♀️

More than anything this seems like people want to blame something solid.
I’m not a fan of our current government but lockdowns and mask-wearing seemed like the best defence we had at the time.
Expecting not to have locked down nurseries, schools etc is expecting none of the staff of those places to get sick and be unable to work. We have vaccines now and staffing levels at schools and hospitals are falling in the current peak.

COVID did this to children, it did this to everyone. It sucks because it’s not a solid thing you can blame, but it was the pandemic itself that caused this.

What we can do is hold the government accountable for slashing education funding, not providing any sort of ‘fix’ to help children catch up and then blindly expecting them to reach these goals.

I'm sure some children have suffered as have some adults but a lot of what this article shows is lack of engagement from parents. It really shouldn't be up to nurseries to teach children to walk and talk ffs.

You're missing the point. Parents were having to work with no childcare. Children were trapped indoors all day with lonely, depressed and anxious mothers who wound up looking at their phones and laptops all day long because they were frantic for interaction with another adult. Lockdown created unfeasible amounts of cooking and washing up and cleaning, and almost every activity that you were told to do with your locked-down toddler created piles and piles of mess. There came a point where parents simply couldn't face it any more, and resorted to screens to try and get through the day.

I thought my then two year old was doing okay, until during the second (or third, depending how you count the extended circuit-breaker we had in Scotland) we were playing in the snow and he heard children playing at the end of the road (unusual where we live) and shouted "[name] is coming, I'm coming" and just took off down the road to find these children he heard in the distance. My heart broke, it just made me realise how much he did miss interacting with other kids.

He's now 3 and his speech is fine, but his social skills are behind (according to the nursery). Maybe that would have been the case regardless, but it makes me so angry that he missed out on so much social interaction.

At the moment we're on week 6 since January of no pre-school due to COVID/staffing issues. At least I can now take him to playgroups & places where he can interact with others, but I just want him to have some stability. Not to mention it's now a choice of keeping my job or making sure he still gets to see other children when nursery is closed. I'm genuinely reaching the point where I can't do both and I'm not sure I got it the right way round during previous closures.

For my circumstances personally, losing my business was much harder to survive then isolating at home with a toddler and homeschooling the older DC. This was a business I worked so hard to open and put my heart and soul onto after years of unemployment.

The financial implications of the lockdowns and the effect it had on my own personal mental health far outweigh the impact it had on my DC. Maybe I’m fortunate in that regard.

There should have been instructions to socialize in groups of 2-3 (no big groups), do things outdoors as much as possible, and ventilate rooms as much as possible. Outdoors should have been left alone, including playparks, beaches, benches, and NO bloody coppers coming along intimidating people. There should NEVER have been a blanket ban on all socializing, or ANY restrictions on outdoor time or limits on what you were "allowed" to do outdoors. The above, plus closing mass events and getting people to work at home where possible, plus masks, should have been the limit.

It was so awful and so much hysteria. I remember tearfully confessing to my friend (a nurse very much on the frontline) that I'd been allowing my son to arrange to 'bump into' a friend in the park, because I was so scared for his mental health, and I felt as a parent my responsibility was to help him through the breakdown that was happening in front of my eyes, rather than protect him from a virus that posed him virtually no individual danger. She understood completely, but some other friends would not have.

@FloraPostePosts

But the alternative was to take no mitigation measures against a novel virus which was killing large numbers of people elsewhere, and whose effects we didn’t then understand. We had to keep people safe until we knew how to mitigate against it. Masks are a good defence against airborne viruses if used properly. Lockdowns bought us time to develop vaccines and treatments.

Can you imagine what the death rate would have been if we hadn’t done anything? If we hadn’t taken mitigations and lots of children and babies had died, would you be saying we should have done more?

What do you think we should have done instead, until we knew more about the virus and its effects, and had developed vaccines and treatments?

This.

Either way was going to cause unknown damage. I'm quite glad that lots of people stayed alive.

Agree with @CornishGem1975 and @Benjispruce4 Parents need to take some responsibility!

Kids that spent more time at home with adults should be advanced not behind if they were parented.

Blaming lockdown is crazy and many more people would have died if the lockdowns hadn't occurred.

I'll also never forget having to explain to my crying younger son why our local play park had been chained up, and remained like that for a long time. (We're in Wales where the parks remained locked long after they'd reopened in England)

@ImplementingTheDennisSystem

Kids were thrown under the bus to save 98 year olds. I thought it was an act of insanity all along and, honestly, quietly broke the rules throughout 🤷🏼‍♀️

what a load of absolute shit. And you know it.

Agree. Had a lockdown toddler and we were out everyday walking, exploring. When shops and everything closed, we played at home, read masses of stories and watched Baby Club on CBeebies so we could sing and feel a part of something. Not every toddler or baby will be harmed. It is offensive to suggest so.

How lovely for you.

Do you realize that many parents of toddlers were W-O-R-K-I-N-G full time jobs while this was going on?

Are you always this clueless and thoughtless???

I have a few close friends working in early years. They are observing a large proportion of 3 years olds who are doing much better than predicted ; hitting milestones earlier, securely attached to primary caregivers, speech and language way beyond the usual levels. And another cohort, same age, well behind.

It depends hugely on the interactions and care that was possible / provided through lockdowns but overall I agree with you; we’ve failed our young people.

Agree with @FloraPostePosts and others.

There was no other way to prevent the ghastly policy Boris Johnson was contemplating until saner minds talked him out of it, the bodies piled high.

I'm on my phone and can't link but there are photos online of scenes from NYC of refrigerated containers full of dead bodies of the poor, and mass graves on the desolate Hart Island.

This was the alternative to locking down. Do people here honestly say Boris Johnson should have taken the chance and ignored public health experts?

@bookworm14

YANBU. Many of us pointed out at the time that incalculable damage was being done to children, but we were told that ‘kids are resilient’, and that small children don’t need interaction with anyone other than their parents. Anyone who suggested school and nursery closures might not be a great idea was told that we only wanted our kids at school for the childcare and we couldn’t be bothered to take care of them ourselves. Those of us who posted in desperation about the effect of lockdown on our own kids were told it was our fault.

Everything we warned about has turned out to be correct.

Absolutely. I was one of those up in arms about it, and my children are adults!

@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.

Do you work @beforegodandallthefish ? I ask because I don't know many working parents who sent thier children back way ahead. I also think some parents were lucky. I have two boys. One thrived, the other didn't. I don't blame lockdown. I don't blame myself. I don't blame him. The stars were not aligned for him. He has a very sensitive personality and a list of physical symptoms that have never been diagnosed as anything specific. He has now got back up to secure in all but writing. Still a way to go but he will get there.

To say that all that was required was "effort" is a hugely privileged, insular, short sighted and potentially offensive thing to say.

What we can do is hold the government accountable for slashing education funding, not providing any sort of ‘fix’ to help children catch up and then blindly expecting them to reach these goals

Many of the things that young children have missed could never be made up. Literacy and numeracy could, mostly, be remedied. The best part of 18 months in isolation can't. @Honeymint

@greenteafiend

I'm sure some children have suffered as have some adults but a lot of what this article shows is lack of engagement from parents. It really shouldn't be up to nurseries to teach children to walk and talk ffs.

You're missing the point. Parents were having to work with no childcare. Children were trapped indoors all day with lonely, depressed and anxious mothers who wound up looking at their phones and laptops all day long because they were frantic for interaction with another adult. Lockdown created unfeasible amounts of cooking and washing up and cleaning, and almost every activity that you were told to do with your locked-down toddler created piles and piles of mess. There came a point where parents simply couldn't face it any more, and resorted to screens to try and get through the day.

THIS.

I had severe PND bought on by lockdown with a newborn I was struggling to feed with no support in person and a rambunctious toddler who was used to nursery and friends and interaction. I could barely drag myself out of bed to feed them and keep an eye on them while DH desperately worked every hour under the sun as we were terrified there would be a huge recession and his company would cut jobs.

Criticising parents for not singing to their kids when they world was going to shit and everyone was doing their best to get through the day is unfair. As soon as things opened up, I got CBT and medication, we could engage with HV and go to baby groups etc things improved hugely and I became the loving interactive mother I was before/wanted to be. It was a hideous time.

@Imanidiotiknow my 3yo DS has a speech delay too, and had lots of interaction, stories singing etc. with family at home during lockdown as a 1yo. But all our local playgrounds were chained shut during the first lockdown, he rarely went to the shops, out to eat, few days out, less time with wider family, no toddler groups running, no play dates etc etc. So while mine probably would have struggled with speech and communication anyway, it's impossible to say how much better/worse without lockdowns. It's horrible, and I can't help beating myself up about it and it's horrible to come on threads like this with posters saying: "if your child struggled it's cos your a shit parent." That's not true, all children are different and have strengths and weaknesses just like adults. It stands to reason that some will be more impacted than others!

YANBU. Many of us pointed out at the time that incalculable damage was being done to children, but we were told that ‘kids are resilient’, and that small children don’t need interaction with anyone other than their parents. Anyone who suggested school and nursery closures might not be a great idea was told that we only wanted our kids at school for the childcare and we couldn’t be bothered to take care of them ourselves. Those of us who posted in desperation about the effect of lockdown on our own kids were told it was our fault.

The gaslighting is likely to have a longlasting effect on parents' level of trust in public health. I have always been very much a "trust the public health people" kind of person, but I find myself eyerolling or thinking "Hmm, is that really true?" a lot more often than I used to when I hear some PH type telling us to do this or that. A lot of it seems to be nakedly political, or is about treating the public like a bunch of complete idiots.

@Foolsrule

Agree with *@CornishGem1975 and @Benjispruce4* Parents need to take some responsibility!

I think that's very harsh. Yes, as ever, some parents will have been shit - their children will have been failed by not having the contact with other adults that would raise concerns.

But most parents were struggling to get by. Have you WFH with small children, for months on end? I didn't, I only had a small taste as I was on maternity leave for most of it. I feel not one shred of judgement for the vast majority of parents who were caught between a rock and a hard place, and needed to choose between parenting well and keeping their jobs (to, y'know, pay for food and housing).

As ever, MN can be supremely unsupportive of parents of young children, and mothers in particular.

I also ultimately think older children and teenagers were worse affected and will be worse affected as we deal with the repercussions + cost of living crisis + war etc. I feel very sad for the younger generation but motivated to be positive and create the best world they can grow up in as possible.

Some areas had more stringent restrictions and for longer due to covid rates. Often deprived areas where toddlers were already behind age related expectations.