What happened to the kids told 'not to kill Granny'?
New research has shown that lockdowns fuelled a staggering rise in teenage eating disorders – and this was not the only damage done
Every day new evidence emerges of the harms of lockdown on children. We know that school closures had a devastating impact on education. Pupils who started in reception in September 2019 spent, on average, 85 days out of the classroom. Some children, placed in ‘bubbles’ where whole classes or even entire year groups were sent home on the basis of just one pupil testing positive for Covid-19, missed far more. As a result, the proportion of pupils leaving primary school meeting literacy and numeracy benchmarks fell from 65 per cent in 2018–19 to 59 per cent in 2021–22.
Of course, some children suffered far more from school closures than others. From day one of lockdown it was clear that while some children were receiving a full timetable of interactive online lessons, others were not. We now know that the educational attainment gap, the difference in performance between disadvantaged pupils and their better off classmates, widened significantly between 2020 and 2022, marking a reversal in the previous decade when the gap appeared to be shrinking.
Once schools re-opened, many thousands of children failed to turn up. Last year, pupil absences stood at double the pre-pandemic level with around 1.5 million children missing over 10 per cent of timetabled classes. Over 100,000 ‘ghost children’ have almost entirely disappeared from education. And with the ‘social contract’ between school and home broken, attendance is reported to be lowest on Fridays, as parents sanction long weekends. Truancy is far higher in more socially deprived communities.
We also know that, over the course of the pandemic, the number of youngsters seeking help for mental health problems soared, jumping from an estimated 12.1 per cent of children in 2017 to 17.8 per cent in 2022. The youngest children - those aged between 7 and 10 - saw the biggest increase. Worsening adolescent mental health has been sadly confirmed this week, with research published in The Lancet showing that lockdowns fuelled a staggering 42 per cent rise in eating disorders among teenage girls and led to a similar increase in incidents of self-harm. Hospital admissions due to eating disorders saw their sharpest annual increase in the year after the pandemic, increasing from 5,950 amongst under-18s to 7,767 in a year.
Despite this damning weight of evidence, the national covid inquiry has, so far at least, shown little interest in acknowledging the impact lockdown had on the lives of many children let alone interrogating why this situation was allowed to occur.
Former Chancellor George Osborne came closest to revealing what was really at stake with scattergun lockdown policies when he gave evidence at the inquiry earlier this week. Governments have to weigh ‘life expectancy’ against sacrificing ‘the educational opportunities of an eight-year-old’ he declared. While we are yet to learn exactly how the ‘weighing up’ took place, the conclusion of such deliberations has long been clear.
Adding to the life expectancy of already elderly people won out over preserving the opportunities and freedoms enjoyed by the young. The average age of coronavirus fatalities was 82.4 years while people dying from other causes in the same period lived to be 81.5 years. Meanwhile, children were kept at home as schools, youth clubs, sports teams, music lessons and even playgrounds closed down.
Some lucky children coped with being isolated from friends and classmates for extended periods. But many did not. The Lancet reports that the sharpest increase in eating disorders was among girls aged 13 - 16. The lead author of the study suggests that social isolation, anxiety, disruption in education and over exposure to negative social media influences left many children feeling they had lost control over their lives and that this could have contributed to the development of eating disorders.
The question that has yet to be answered is why, in the process of weighing adult life expectancy against child safeguarding, Covid policy makers came down so firmly on the side of the elderly. In a complete reversal of the normal social contract, children were expected to make life-changing sacrifices to protect adults.
The readiness to see children and adults as equals and, when it came to Covid, ‘all in it together’, was set in place long before the pandemic. Over the course of several decades, the once distinctive categories of ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ have become blurred. Middle-aged mums and dads share clothes with their teenage children while family-friendly pubs resemble creches.
Confusion about what it means to be a child or an adult plays out in government policies. Under-18s are prevented from purchasing cigarettes or alcohol and yet, until very recently, could be prescribed puberty-blocking hormones if they were confused about their gender identity. Just this weekend my 17 year-old daughter was stopped from purchasing a pen knife for her Duke of Edinburgh award camping expedition, yet - if we lived in Scotland or Wales - she would be able to vote in national elections. Adults seem uncertain whether they are to protect children or be led by them.
These collapsing boundaries are not the result of children marching for suffrage or demanding more rights. Rather, they stem from adults rejecting the moral authority that once came with maturity and failing to assume responsibility for a younger generation. The upshot is that a cohort of children have been left to negotiate their own way through a world that denies them even the most basic of boundaries. How else to explain the case that came to light this week of the girl that identifies as a cat? Having failed to inform the child concerned that she is not now nor never will be a cat, the girl’s teacher then labels her classmates - clearly desperate to discover the limits of the boundary-less dystopia they find themselves in - as despicable.
A society that insists upon teaching young children about oral sex, masturbation, polyamory and gender fluidity in school Relationships and Sex Education classes, while affirming teenagers who identify as animals, lets children down badly. Worse still, it suggests that children are political pawns, a captive audience for adults with an agenda but a distaste for arguing with people their own age. Children are exploited first by activists and then by other adults who know better but are too cowardly to speak out.
In this context, it should not surprise us that, during lockdown, children were expected to make sacrifices to protect adults. Policy-makers knew from the point at which Covid-19 first emerged that this was a virus that disproportionately targetted the elderly and clinically vulnerable. But telling teenagers ‘Don’t Kill Granny’ placed the responsibility for protecting the elderly directly on to the shoulders of children. Youngsters were told that staying at home and living their lives through a screen was the only way to save much-loved relatives. It is hard to think of a clearer instance of adults abdicating responsibility.
For a brief period post-lockdown, there was talk of summer camps and catch-up classes to compensate children for the social and educational opportunities they missed. Few ever materialised. Instead, we have pupils missing yet more school trips and sports days because their striking teachers have decided - yet again - to prioritise their own needs. And we have university students who spent their first year studying entirely on-line, now graduating without degree certificates because their striking lecturers are refusing to grade work.
A final symbol of our warped priorities towards children is how little their concerns feature in the national Covid inquiry. As things stand, the education secretary responsible for closing schools, Gavin Williamson, has not even been called to submit evidence. Children deserve far better.
An edited version of this article was originally published in The Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/22/children-lockdown-sacrifices-paying-price/