The Impact Of Lockdown on Children

We’ve all suffered through lockdown – being furloughed, working at home, losing jobs, missing out on seeing friends, cancelled holidays, loneliness and isolation.  But for our children the lockdown had a very definite impact in the form of disruption to routines and normality.

A recent study conducted by childcare.co.uk has ranked what 3000 childcare providers think are the key skills that remote schooling will have driven young children to miss out on. There are eight key areas identified below. As a non-professional in this area, desperately trying to facilitate enforced remote learning for a ten and seven year old during the pandemic, I can completely see the impact on my own kids. *Toilet training excluded, you’ll be pleased to know, we crossed that milestone some time ago.

The areas care givers agree kids have missed out include:

1. Interacting with peers and other adults (selected by 95% of providers)

2. Communication and language, including the adoption of American accents from apps and games (selected by 92% of providers)

3. Sharing (selected by 88%)

4. Toilet training (selected by 85% of providers)

5. Personal confidence (selected by 74% of providers)

6. Reading and writing skills (selected by 69% of providers)

7. Emotional development (selected by 69% of providers)

8. Physical development (selected by 63% of providers)

It’s not all bad news though. Those surveyed also stated that as things start to return to normal, the learning of these skills will kick back in. Care providers reported that they believe the best thing you can do is model behavior relevant to the list above as much as possible as children imitate what they are exposed to. Mindfulness of the possible pitfalls seems to be a key part of ensuring minimal longer term issues.

Richard Conway, founder of Childcare.co.uk, said, “Many parents will have undoubtedly done a fantastic job through lockdown of juggling childcare, education, work and day to day life, but there are some elements of growing up that can only be fully developed in a community environment where children are surrounded by their peers and guided by professionals.

“If anything, I hope that lockdown will have resulted in a greater appreciation for the tireless work that childcare providers put in every single day to ensure our children are developing these key skills at a critical part of their lives that can have lasting impacts for years to come.”

From my own perspective, I feel and hope that my kids may well just have missed most of these things. I think they would love and welcome the chance to interact and share more often.  The communication and language point includes the impact of technology on kid’s accents and vocabulary which is interesting for their lives generally. Around 75% of providers stated that for older preschool and primary school children there is a chance they will have developed a slight American accent from YouTube videos and TV.

As a British mother of kids currently living in America I can’t lie about feeling a mild sense of comfort that my children’s weird accent evolutions maybe now won’t seem as weird on our return. I have even greater experience of how this happens.

My daughter Holly was born in the UK, moved to America at seven and is now ten. She speaks in a British accent when she is talking to a Brit and American when talking to an American – OR performing anything remotely related to anything she has seen on a gadget.

My emotions relating to this phenomenon are mixed. I admire her ability to even do an American accent, let alone switch, yet I feel a little bad that she feels she has to hide who she is. As a grown up in America, my British accent feels like a little superpower in some situations; something people find interesting about you without you having to be that interesting. I guess when you are ten it’s more about fitting in and not standing out. It’s nice that Holly has fixed this whole situation for her own social salvation.

In a slightly different scenario, my son Ben has been in America since he was four. His accent is 100% 1970’s British Disk Jockey … mate…  or sometimes dude. It is consistent. I would hesitate to call it American though in exactly the same measure that I would hesitate to call it British. It is neither, it’s simply the way Ben talks.

In these strange times, I guess we all need to be mindful and ready to adjust and adapt and I guess whether you say “tomarto” or “tomayto”, it’s most important to agree that it’s a fruit not a vegetable and however you say it, it tastes exactly the same.