My mum was born into a working class south London family in October, 1939 and spent most of her first six years sleeping in the underground waiting for the raids to end, their houses were bombed out twice, male relatives away for years on end, poor temporary housing, no schooling and little decent food
This story sounds very similar to my Dad’s - also born in 1939, working class council estate childhood in East London, passed the 11+ (though left school at 15 as university wasn’t on the radar), a year’s National Service in Kenya (which he admits was pretty much a jolly spent on safari), then walked into a white-collar job in the City and stayed there until retirement. Ended up financially quite comfortable. Most of my parents’ friends tell similar stories; lots of them have now retired comfortably out in Herts and Essex. From disrupted and quite poverty-stricken beginnings they’ve all done pretty well for themselves.
The thing is, though, this cohort benefitted from the prevailing social, political and economic conditions of their time. Wartime babies though they were, by the time my Dad was starting school there was a new post-war social contract. The wartime hardships and sacrifices were recognised. The NHS and a generous welfare state was just being brought in. There was a grammar school system (whatever the rights and wrongs of this, grammars were great at the time for lifting a certain kind of bright working class kid out of poverty). My parents were entering work just as the optimism and economic boom of the 1960s was on the horizon.
As it stands, the current cohort of young people will have none of this. They will be faced with a massive - almost unimaginably large - bill from lockdown. There will be a mental health crisis, but very little mental health support available. There will be a cohort of inadequately socialised children starting school, but no additional resources on the horizon to support them. There will be many, many families where the parents are newly out of work, but without the generous safety net of the post-war welfare state. Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this, but I have little faith that our current leaders (or, to be fair, most of the current opposition) have any great vision or will to make things better in the long term for our young people. And, of course, they also have Brexit and climate change to contend with.
If the attitude of ‘kids are resilient’ becomes dominant then the resources and support for them won’t be there.
I completely agree with this. We can’t help our kids and young people unless we’re prepared to admit there’s a problem coming down the line, but at the moment many people are refusing to see it. As soon as someone tentatively suggests that we need a plan to reopen schools safely, they’re shouted down with cries of BUT THE VIRUS!; DO YOU WANT PEOPLE TO DIE?; BUT IT’S THE KIDS WHO ARE SPREADING IT! (Just read the replies to Devi Sridhar’s tweet from earlier today.) I’ve seen many mental health professionals, charity workers and child psychologists tweeting about what they’re seeing and trying to spark discussions in the wider media, but what they’re saying is either falling on deaf ears, or met with ‘Shame about the kids but people are dying/we need to protect the NHS’. Many of our kids are indeed resilient, but this isn’t just about them individually; it’s about the kind of world they’re going to be facing once this is all over. Essentially everyone’s in Covid panic mode right now, but we urgently need to switch to planning mode if we’re going to avert a further generational crisis once the pandemic itself is over.