I can believe this certainly in the first wave of lockdowns. I would wonder a lot however what happened in the 2nd/3rd and so on for places that had them. I do find it slightly annoying that there seems to be a default uncritical acceptance of the view that lockdown was universally terrible for kids mental health when I know first hand of several examples where it wasn't at all. I feel like some amount of that is a fig leaf over the fact that many kids are living in unhealthy environments at home to begin with. So lockdown means they are exposed to more of that, but it's not the lockdown causing the harm it is the home environment where they are exposed to harmful factors.
It's hard to explain just how brutal and inhuman the lockdown experience was for those of us with kids. At least, those of us who refused to follow the "new normal" of allowing our kids' lives to be ever-increasingly ruled by phones and tablets.
The times I have spoken up in the past have not gone well for me (and almost entirely, it was speaking to people without kids who tell me that "lockdowns aren't so bad" after they've been out cycling all day). There were all of the obvious retorts, like "well, shows how much you don't care about KILLING EVERYONE", as well as ideas like "well, they're your kids, you look after them". That's a bit hard when you and everyone you know are under house arrest.
In fact, it was the experience of living through lockdowns with a 1 year old and a pregnant wife that so strongly coloured my opinions on the overall benefits of them - judging by their effects on the next generation, we have screwed up really badly.
I know several teachers, and they all say that the culture of learning has been disrupted, and those who teach in disadvantaged areas, say that kids will never recover. By "a culture of learning", I mean that it is generally accepted that all kid go to school and at least attempt to get some qualifications. We don't know what we've got till it's gone.
I'm so glad to hear these stories finally surfacing. I had a one-year-old and a pregnant wife when lockdowns started. It was absolutely brutal, as we both had full-time jobs, and obviously there was absolutely nowhere to go or no-one to turn to for help. It has most definitely coloured my opinions of the usefulness of lockdowns. One of the most dismaying long-term effects of what parents have been made to go through is what I consider the abrupt decline in acceptable parenting techniques - how many young kids have now been deliberately stuffed in front of a TV or given a tablet to keep them quiet, while parents try to hold down jobs? Part of what made our lives so hard was my refusal to do such things.
I find this very interesting as well. I definitely have felt way more anxious during the lockdowns we've had. There's definitely a pervasive atmosphere which is very draining even though objectively my family have had a very easy time of things.
Not quite sure about this, lockdowns are having profound psychological implications, especially on the young ones. A child can't be expected to sit in a zoom session all day, it's simply not possible!
This study was from the first lockdown period in June / July 2020, which I expect not to be strongly correlated with the way people feel now.
In my experience and from talking with friends and family, it wasn't the initial lockdown that took a toll on their mental health - it was the sustained lockdowns over a two year period.
The first lockdown was stressful and there was a lot of uncertainty, but it was also novel and exciting in a way with a sense of the entire world coming together to overcome something. After three or four lockdowns that no longer held.
Besides the economic harm and potential developmental harm induced by closing schools for kids, I think lockdowns did incalculable social harm to society. It gave huge swaths of the population a grudge against the system, a chip on their shoulder that won't go away anytime soon. It burned up goodwill and trust for experts and politicians (who generally didn't have much to spare in the first place.) And coupling this with social isolation at the same time made a lot of people become frayed around the edges if not outright insane.
Data point: my kids are doing fine. They hated lockdown, but who didn’t? They aren’t behind in either academic or social terms.
However, they had parents who supported them throughout with home learning, extracurricular learning, love and encouragement, and a network of friends and families in similar conditions who worked together to keep up virtual contact and socialisation.
What I worry about are the kids who didn’t have this kind of support. We had the resources to compensate for lockdown. A lot of families didn’t
In the final evaluation, I expect this will result in a deepening rich-poor divide.
This is somewhat ironic considering it was predominantly leftward politicians advocating for more/deeper lockdowns that disproportionately harm the poor, and rightward politicians advocating for relaxing lockdowns and sacrificing the elderly.
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