Lockdowns Have Stolen The Childhoods Of Millions Of Children

Government Lockdowns Have Stolen the Childhoods of Millions of Children

RICK MORAN

What has been the cost of the pandemic? Eventually, it will all be totaled up, placed in nice, neat rows and columns, and historians will be able to tell future generations how much wealth disappeared, how many jobs were lost — dollars, cents, pesos, shekels, yen. Perhaps they will be able to quantify the cost of lost human liberty and personal freedom.

But there’s something that no one will be able to calculate. How can you put a dollar amount on a lost childhood? On millions of lost childhoods?

The years between a child’s sixth and eighteenth birthdays are about how long it takes for a child to become a grown human being. Just 12 years to go from essentially being a toddler to an adult. There’s so much to learn about life, about love, about how the world works and one’s place in it.

Parents, of course, are critical in this process. But they have help from aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, and other members of an extended family. The bonds formed with family are stronger than any relationships a child will form except perhaps a spouse, who will be welcomed into most families as a full-fledged member of the family unit.

But the pandemic has short-circuited the process of forming these bonds. Not just with family, but lifelong friendships are also developed in these years. Interacting with others is crucial to developing socialization skills that allows a child to function in the larger world.

This has all been denied them. And this year of being cut off from everything a child needs to develop will cost them.

“The coronavirus pandemic has been hitting adolescents hard,” science journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer noted last week in UnDark. “During the teen years, friendships matter more than almost everything else… But this year, teens have been forced to stay home and avoid real-world interactions with their friends. They have had to spend their days denied of their deepest needs while, in some cases, taking on more responsibilities — yet without many of the emotional supports they had in the past.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Andrea Peterson writes that the pandemic has delivered a series of blows to kids.  Many have experienced social isolation during lockdowns, family stress, a breakdown of routine and anxiety about the virus.”

And there’s science to back up those worries.

“Posttraumatic, anxiety, and depression disorders are expected during and aftermath of the pandemic,” cautioned a September 2020 article in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. “Some groups, like children, have more susceptibility to having long term consequences in mental health.”

“[C]hildren’s depression ratings significantly increased during the lockdown, relative to 18 months beforehand,” found a November 2020 article on the results of lockdowns in the UK in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

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