As my daughter grows, ever more of our Christmas tree ornaments originate with her: decorated by her at school or preschool, or little end-of-term gifts from teachers. When we decorate the tree, unwrapping each one comes with a little payload of memory from the year it arrived. Recently, unpacking and hanging these decorations, one pulled me up short. It came from preschool, dated 2020. The snowman is wearing a mask.
I stared at it, then I was in tears.
Humans are resilient. Bad things happen, and eventually we move on. But we remember, too. We just wrap those memories up and store them in unexpected places, such as a box of Christmas tree ornaments. 2020 still feels like a blur to me: one long horrible Groundhog Day. But that little snowman abruptly took me right there. Lovingly painted, its little face-mask trying to make something fun of something nightmarish, it captures the heroic efforts of everyone with children in their care. So many parents and carers, making the best of something utterly beyond the capacity of an infant to understand: an official ban on almost all spontaneous touch and social connection.
What does Zoom mean to a toddler? So much of a child’s social world is wordless, conducted in the language of touch, face, and gesture. A loved and trusted other is not a face on a screen but a living, breathing, warm, huggable entity. And for this group, a virus which posed relatively little risk to them meant almost all of this was abruptly taken away. More under-18s died of influenza than Covid-19 in 2020, but we don’t shut the world down for the flu.
We did for Covid. Was it worth it?
How do you calculate something like that? We know that maternal post-natal depression can have lasting negative effects on a developing child. What, then, about the fact that rates of perinatal depression doubled during lockdown, affecting nearly half of all mothers of newborns? What of the children, now toddlers, who didn’t interact with anyone other than their parents for months or even years of their earliest life, and are now developmentally delayed on a raft of measures compared to previous cohorts?
Was it worth it for the millions of children left to scroll unspeakable corners of the internet, unsupervised, for months on end, while their parents tried to keep up with Zoom work? Those all the way up to university age who lost years of education? What about the depression and PTSD that rocketed in kids between seven and 12 between March and June that year? Was it worth that? What about those trapped at home with abusive or neglectful parents?
But just as the downsides of lockdown weren’t evenly distributed, nor were the risks of Covid. Someone elderly or immune-compromised might say: yes, kids were not at great danger from the virus. But why should the demographics most at risk of severe illness and death be recklessly endangered, for the sake of children with their whole lives ahead of them? And this is the nub of the problem. Every human culture prior to our own understood the tragic dimension of human life: that is, the truth that some situations have no good outcome, only messy choices and their painful aftermath. In the Christian tradition, we see something like this in the doctrine of original sin, which holds that we can never make life on earth perfect — because each of us carries a taint of wickedness, and can only hope and pray for salvation.
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