Children will never recover from the terrible cost of lockdown

Another day, another report revealing the damage from Covid policies to children and their development. The latest outrage is a 10 per cent annual increase in the number of five and six year olds in England requiring specialist speech and language support.

Is it any surprise? This is, after all, the group whose pre-school experiences were the most disrupted by pandemic restrictions on social interaction. The increase is even bigger in Scotland, which had more restrictions for longer. These pupils join a waiting list of over 65,000 under 18s referred for specialist help. They are struggling with basic skills – understanding instructions, taking turns and negotiation.

Their experiences form an ever-growing body of evidence on the negative impact of lockdowns and face coverings. It is consistent with longaccepted psychological findings that for children, a lack of interaction with peers and caretakers is very damaging.

Pandemic isolation weighed most heavily on children who were already deprived by poverty. They could be confined to rooms in temporary housing with a single parent for long periods. Councils closed parks and playgrounds where they might interact with other children. Even where parents could work from home, children’s opportunities for language learning and social development were limited.

When small children could go out, they encountered masked faces everywhere. The importance of faces has been clear to psychologists since filmed studies of mother/child interaction in delivery suites during the 1970s. From the first moment a baby is handed to its mother, it focuses on her face and establishes eye contact. Small children need to see lip shapes and movements to be able to form words and make the correct sounds. Too often, these instances were denied. It must be said that these fundamentals of child development were as evident two years ago as they are today. The risks were spelled out by psychologists from the beginning of the pandemic, and largely ignored.

The question now is: can these children recover? Pro-lockdown policymakers assumed that children are infinitely resilient, believing “whatever we do to them, their development will catch up”. If this were possible, it would be a very tall order. Primary teaching would have to make more use of group work, collaborative projects and learning through play. This would require teacher retraining and lower staff/ child ratios, and won’t come cheap.

Some children may never recover. The psychological evidence on lifetime outcomes is uncertain because of the ethical constraints on experiments with children, but it is likely that there are critical periods in development. If learning does not take place at that time, it may not be possible for it to happen later. This question, and others, could be investigated by a large-scale study to monitor the children of Covid over the next 20-40 years. However, I do not have much confidence that this will happen. Today’s children may not even have the consolation that their suffering has yielded some scientific benefit.

Robert Dingwall is emeritus professor of sociology at Nottingham Trent University and a former member of several government advisory groups