Eight weeks into the first lockdown in the UK I met a woman and her young son, not yet two, in a park. Within minutes she had broken down. She was a single mother, he was an only child, and with nurseries closed and play-dates forbidden, her son hadn’t seen anyone other than her in two months. Zoom calls with family and hours of CBeebies were no substitute for human interaction, she told me (from the required two metres away). She wished he had siblings to play with. He was lonely, he wasn’t talking as much as he used to, she feared his development had stalled. What would be the long-term repercussions of denying him contact with other children?
That boy will be turning five soon. He’s probably about to finish his first year at school, part of a cohort of children whose early years were shaped by the pandemic. In some ways, his age group is one of the more fortunate. He won’t remember the feeling of isolation, and by the time he went to school the world was getting back to normal. Older children suffered the biggest impact: sent home in March 2020, then again in January 2021, forced to continue their education remotely for months on end.
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