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The stress and isolation of the pandemic have left social and emotional marks that are already being seen in children, but scientists also predict there could be huge economic costs due to disrupted education.
For US pre-school teacher Rebekah Underwood, there is something different about the class of 2025. She's noticed that the children she teaches – aged between five and six years old – are physically more cautious than the group who attended the pre-school in Santa Monica in California before the pandemic.
"Many kids are not able to roll, not able to jump on two feet, they are very hesitant to climb," she says. She wonders if it has something to do with a lack of outdoor exploration that happened when these children were toddlers. They are among the group who were babies when Covid-19 hit.
In March 2020, schools around the world began to suddenly close and life for the 2.2 billion children and young people around the world took a dramatic change. Whole families found themselves stuck at home, venturing outside only for short, allotted periods while children of school age were taught by their parents or learned via a screen.
It meant that children lost the rhythm of everyday life – the opportunity to attend clubs, play sports, practice hobbies were replaced with activities at home, crafts and television. Many also missed out on milestones like school dances, parties and graduations. In some places, students wouldn't be back, mixing with their peers, for a year. The average school was closed for 5.5 months, but some were shuttered much longer. Combine that with the stress of the pandemic and of their parents in an unprecedented situation, it triggered widespread speculation about what impact the Covid-19 pandemic would have on the generation of young people experiencing it.
Childhood experiences, after all, tend to have an outsized effect on life trajectories because they can alter brain development, behaviour and overall wellbeing.
Underwood and her colleagues saw a difference in the children they were teaching almost as soon as schools reopened in 2021. This year, which includes children who were only just being born as the pandemic hit, they are seeing some improvements on previous years.
The children in Underwood's young classes, for example, are easily overstimulated. The school where she works had to suspend music classes two years ago, because instruments in the classroom were simply too much for the young children to handle – the raucous noise, both joyful and chaotic, made them very upset. "Half the class sat outside because they were so overstimulated," Underwood says. "Especially in a hands-on classroom, it's hard to manage." She wonders if these children who didn't experience music groups or playgrounds when they were little now struggle with loud, chaotic environments. This year, they have slowly started reintroducing music into the curriculum.
Five years after Covid-19 first began spreading around the world, triggering widespread lockdowns, researchers are starting to unravel the effect of the abrupt societal changes may have had on children. The pandemic has left its mark on their behaviour, mental health, social skills and their education. But how deep those scars may run and their effects in the long term may only become clear in the decades to come. --->READ MORE HERE
The COVID-19 pandemic turned kids’ lives upside down — and parents aren’t ready to forgive the school officials, politicians, and members of the media who allowed unscientific school closures to drag on for years.
Schools across the US sent kids home and switched to remote learning in March 2020 and many didn’t start in person again until the 2022-2023 school year, resulting in an unprecedented amount of lost classroom time.
Daniel Kotzin, a father of two then-preschoolers picked up his family from San Francisco, where public schools were shut down while private schools remained open, and moved to Denver in 2021 so his son could start school in person.
“My wife, my son, my daughter and I got on a plane Sunday evening with the clothes on our back and rented an Airbnb in Denver so Oscar could attend kindergarten.”
They found a pre-school there for their daughter, Ruth, who had already been speaking both Spanish and English until a mask mandate upended her progress.
“As a result of the lockdowns and the mask policy, she had trouble learning either language instead of learning both languages,” he said.
Daniel believes strict policies in San Francisco — like a six foot distancing rule at playgrounds — permanently changed Ruth. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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