Children in lockdown: We never thought of them
With a measly excuse, 'Boris' refused to rule out another lockdown, having clearly failed to recognise the mounting evidence that shutting down the country for months on end does far more harm than good.
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Babies are struggling with facial expressions after spending long stretches of their earliest, most malleable years of earth locked indoors, away from their longing relatives, and when out, surrounded by face masks. Children are struggling with the basics, like blowing their nose and putting on their coat, after months and months away from school, cooped up with stressed parents. Even older children are increasingly upset when dropped off at school, having been denied the
opportunity to make friends for too long.
These are just three findings highlighted, in harrowing detail, in a new Ofsted report on the impact of lockdown on children and attempts by schools and other education providers to recover from them. But for the Prime Minister, none of this seems to matter. "There could be a new variant, more deadly," he warns. One that "affects children badly, that we really need to contain".
With this measly excuse, 'Boris' Johnson refused to rule out another lockdown, having clearly failed to recognise the mounting evidence that shutting down the country for months on end does far more harm than good.
Does the impact of lockdown on children not matter to the PM? For Arabella Skinner, from children's campaign group UsForThem, which worked tirelessly through lockdown, the answer is a definite no. She told me for an article I wrote in Express Online: "Children have never been at the front of the discussion of what the risk is and what the value is. The problems we are seeing now are evidence of that." There really are too many problems to go over here. Some, like those mentioned above, cannot be said to have been caused by lockdown alone. We have detailed the many failures in Britain's education system and – let's be frank – in far too many homes across the country over and over again in these pages. Schools have long had to employ "professional toothbrushing overseers", forexample. "Professional nappy changers," too. But it is beyond doubt these issues have been exacerbated.
It is obvious why. This extract from the Ofsted report explains a lot: "Children have missed out on hearing stories, singing and having conversations. One provider commented that children appear to have spent more time on screens and have started to speak in accents and voices that resemble the material they have watched." Children spending more and more time in front of screens is, again, nothing new. But the trend was made all the worse during lockdown, when parks were covered with yellow-and-black tape and popular walks were monitored by drones. Now, one teacher trainer from the Midlands told me in another of my pieces for Express Online children increasingly "play using American accents... Also I noticed that they make a lot of references to things they've watched in thir work. So if you asked them to write a sentence, they'd often include a character they've watched in it or, a lot of the time, YouTubers."
The day this piece was published, I overheard a young girl – perhaps seven or eight – referring to her headteacher as her "principal". I wondered whether this was what we called them now, in the same way we call series of television programmes "seasons". The source of the word some became clear, however, when she went on to dance, explaining: "I'm twerking. It's from TikTok."
Another teacher trainer, this time from North London, and again referenced in an article for Express Online, told me trying to teach children how to tell the time long after this was supposed to be instilled (yes, I know you're wondering about the home again. I'll cover this further in a later issue) was "like teaching them a foreign language this late on".
These, of course, are simply anecdotes about missed learning and the increasing dominance of television in the raising of our children. Perhaps the social impact – physically preventing children from making friends, from discovering the world with others, from having a childhood – of lockdown is far worse. And even worse still for children with additional care needs.
I reported in another piece for you-know-where: "One Assistant Psychologist who works within children's homes in the Midlands told [me] many children in care who already suffered from a range of trauma-induced anxiety disorders have seen their conditions 'exacerbated' by long, isolating, stress-filled lockdowns... The children for whom consistency is most essential following years of disruption have, the AP warned, suffered yet 'another hit to their routine' – one that will continue to have an impact."
Even all this is merely scratching on the surface of the damage done to children by lockdown, never mind to the economy, to liberty, to the mental and physical health of the nation as a whole. And our leaders, even this long after they first implemented the hideous policy, have still not bothered to consider the impacts of what they've done. Of what – out of ignorance? stupidity? what? – they would do all over again.
