How Covid destroyed our lives, from newborns to pensioners

For Dan Paskins, interim executive director at Save the Children, such longer-term effects are hardly surprising. “There’s been a really big impact on the expected levels of children’s social and emotional development in their first few years,” he says. “There’s been some really rapid regression.”

The lockdown babies are now starting school, and the impact of their extraordinary early days is stark. “There’s a school in Birmingham where more than half the children entering [Reception] were still wearing nappies,” says Paskins. “Before the pandemic there might have been one or two. Now more than half have that developmental delay, and what that means in terms of how children are able to learn and function.”

Across the country, teachers now say almost a quarter of children in their Reception class are not toilet trained, according to a survey by the Kindred Squared charity published in February. Pupils are losing, on average, a third of their learning time each day as teachers are spending time supporting children who are not school-ready, the research highlighted.

Although decline in school readiness has been a growing trend since well before the pandemic, lockdown is thought to have exacerbated it. “The year group coming into Reception now are the lockdown babies and you can really see it in the extent of the social need, difficulties with behaviour, [struggles] with separation, sharing and language development,” says Liz Robinson, chief executive of Big Education, a multi-academy trust. “If a child is in nappies and needs to be changed, it drains the resources. It means those staff [changing nappies] are not in the classroom interacting with the other children.”

Molly Devlin, early years network lead for the Ark Schools group, where she supports Reception classes, says she has seen “more [children] than ever before” starting school in nappies this year and last. This reflects the disruption to children’s services during lockdown, she says. “There was a complete stop to services like health visitors and two-year [developmental] checks were happening over the phone and therefore were totally dependent on parent self-reporting.”

Parents experienced “significant isolation”, as Devlin points out. Those who didn’t know what milestones their infants should be meeting were cut off from the professionals and peers who could have informed them, and from the help they might otherwise have received.

While not all children were adversely affected (some benefited from their parents being at home more) a question mark hangs over whether those who suffered the worst effects will ever catch up. “It wasn’t like it was a rubbish time but that’s all over,” says Paskins. “That impact is continuing.” 

Without intensive support, things are likely to get worse for these children over time, not better, he warns. “You’re less likely to learn and get good exam results and a good job. We’re going to be seeing the impact of this for decades to come.” 

Teenagers 

Holed up in their bedrooms for hours each day, with just social media for company, teenagers missed crucial face-to-face interaction with peers at a formative, and quite often turbulent, life stage. The impact of lockdowns on their mental health has been well-documented. Disruption to their education and prolonged social isolation “exposed young people to many known risk factors for mental illness, raising serious concerns about their wellbeing,” researchers at KCL wrote in 2022. 

One of the university’s studies, published in May 2021, found nearly half of 11 to 12-year-olds in this cohort reported an increase in symptoms of depression, while a quarter reported an increase in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. A systematic review led by KCL’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience found lockdown was associated with psychological distress, loneliness, boredom, fear and stress among young people. Again, girls were found to have been hardest hit.