COVID impact on kids

Some of you will know I’m a teacher but I’m not a parent so I’m really interested in other perspectives on this.

My feeling is that the much discussed academic impacts have largely failed to materialise. Or at least what impacts there are seem to be incremental rather than a major shift.

What I have noticed are behaviour impacts in the class and broader impacts on pupils social skills and general development.

In the class this has manifested as more fractious relationships between pupils and pupils being more likely to go ballistic when challenged on poor behaviour.

I’ve also recently done a few trips and have noticed a significant* increase in the number of pupils who find managing their basic needs (eating, drinking, toileting etc) away from home a challenge. These trips were with pupils of an age where one would expect them to be ok with that. I suppose this can be explained in part at least by them missing both family holidays and school trips due to COVID.

Perhaps both of those observed effects could come under the broad heading of resilience.

What are the hive thoughts?

*When I say significant I mean in my experience, not any statistical analysis and I’m open to the idea that the observed effects either don’t exist or are not due to COVID but to me getting old, grumpy and forgetting what it’s like to be a teenager.

Mrs owg works in a primary school reports that there are two year groups going through school at the moment who have significant behaviour and resilience issues, the worst affected being the current year 7s. My neighbour, who is a secondary deputy head, says that they have seen a big spike in behaviour problems, mostly in the younger end of the school. Whether it’s COVID that has caused this, who knows? There has also been a rise in children arriving in Reception who aren’t toilet trained.

It might not be Covid so much as the effect of social media saturation. There was a link on another thread suggesting this but I also wonder how much it’s down to less “resilient” parenting; apparently there is also an increase in the number of kids turning up for first year that aren’t even toilet trained.

I think the ripple effect of societal changes since Covid will make it very difficult to pinpoint anything with any real accuracy.

What I would like to see, with a documented rise in mental health conditions, is more research into the potential relationship between this and the physical damage caused by the virus iself. There’s evidence suggesting it’s damaging people’s brains, yet we’re very rarely making this connection.

(Unless this is what you’re suggesting? These questions usually come under the context of the impact of lockdown.)

Madame Edukator says much the same as Mrs owg above. She’s in secondary and the ones that were in the last two years of primary during the lockdowns have now reached her, they get worse results and more detentions than she normally dishes out.

Striking teachers probably has more of an impact on them tbh.

Striking teachers probably has more of an impact on them tbh.

If you think a handful of strike days has more impact than months of COVID lockdown or societal changes then I think you’re rather over estimating the influence of teachers on kids development.

Striking teachers probably has more of an impact on them tbh.

Not on the shifting patterns of behaviour we are seeing. Social media saturation (as above) and definitely less effective or absent parenting. Combined with a complete lack of any effective early help services. This is based on my experience as a secondary deputy head, safeguarding in NHS and now working in a Pupil Referral Unit.

We’re a Scouting and Guiding family, and these absolutely ring true:

What I have noticed are behaviour impacts in the class and broader impacts on pupils social skills and general development.

I’ve also recently done a few trips and have noticed a significant* increase in the number of pupils who find managing their basic needs (eating, drinking, toileting etc) away from home a challenge.

Talking to our leaders and leaders from other groups, it’s a widespread problem. Two years on things are beginning to improve for kids who have had the opportunity to do activities but it’s still coming through, compounded by the number of volunteers who stepped down during and after Covid.

Kids have never needed more support, in school and outside, and resources just haven’t been there.

Social media saturation (as above) and definitely less effective or absent parenting. Combined with a complete lack of any effective early help service.

Combined with Covid made the perfect storm.

I think the ripple effect of societal changes since Covid will make it very difficult to pinpoint anything with any real accuracy.

Yeah that’s often the case with these things. It’s a complicated picture.

We’re a Scouting and Guiding family, and these absolutely ring true:

Interesting to hear that from a different perspective.

There have always been kids who struggled with basic things in a foreign environment and I think giving them the skills and confidence to cope with that is one of the key things stuff like scouting and school trips provide. However, I’ve been surprised by the numbers on recent trips. I’m talking about 15-17 year olds making themselves ill because they can’t bring themselves to use a public toilet or not eating and drinking because they don’t find exactly the foodstuffs they eat at home or they have to ask for them rather than have it laid out.

I think I’ve underestimated just how many kids (and adults!) find this stuff really difficult, probably because it’s things I normalised at a pretty early age.

I also wonder how much it’s down to less “resilient” parenting

One of my colleagues who has more contact with parents than me says it’s all down to ‘shit parenting’ (her words!). However, shit parenting also had more impact during the lockdowns.

Spin – if it is shit parenting then you would expect this to be a gradual effect before Covid and since Covid,  if it’s a Covid effect (I mean social consequence rather than direct impact of the virus on brain) We should see a spike.

Anecdotally I hear that those who transitioned from p7 so s1 in 2020 and 2021 (current s4/s5) are particularly bad.  I can rationalise that – they had very odd social experiences at a key stage in life.  My daughter is in that age group – it’s difficult to compare to my son (who transitioned to Uni in that time) because of differences between genders, oldest/youngest child etc.  There was a massive (positive) difference in her when she got involved in the local scout (explorer) group.  That would be consistent with your hypothesis.   Presumably the p1s of 2020 would also be a bit “weird”.

it can’t be anything to do with teachers striking as that’s been happening on and off since I was at school, although various extra curricular activities being killed by work to rule, budget cuts, covid etc has almost certainly not helped.  Getting those in power to realise that teachers are more than classroom drones is hard.

none of it surprises me – the people making key decisions really don’t seem to have any understanding of normal childhood.

no idea of toilets issue – that may be related (they were labelled as rooms of death!) but it could be some sort of social stigma / bullying problem – at “our” school they have become the place people go to vape and hide from adult view, so are generally avoided by most kids (the local GP actually uses this as a measure of how urgent and gastric / bladder problems are!).

“Schools told inspectors that the “consequences of lockdowns” meant that “children were starting reception with delayed communication and language, poor self-help skills and emotional difficulties”.”

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/oct/08/school-starters-pandemic-lack-communication-skills-ofsted

Mrs sandboy (primary headteacher) has a bigger problem with parents than their children.

Unrealistic expectations of what the school can do to make up for their parenting shortfalls and the insistence that poor behaviour is a consequence of a learning difficulty are big challenges for her and the staff.

Budget cuts have resulted in her not being able to employ enough support staff to help with the ever increasing number of children with learning difficulties but she’s convinced that PPP (piss poor parenting) is at the root of most children’s problems.

Kids avoiding toilets due to smoking and bullying has been around since I was at school, though other factors may be making it worse now. One of ours went through a stage of not using the toilets at school just because they were in an awful state, I remember raising it with the school. There was a national campaign about it called Bog Standard.

In England the Year 6 residential trip  (final year at primary) was a rite of passage – you could see the kids coming back with increased confidence and maturity after what was often their first week away from family. I think the loss of that, and the loss of the “usual” transition to secondary for those affected years probably accounts for a lot.

It’s not just the younger kids, we’re seeing college leavers entering HE who need a lot of additional support. This won’t go away for a while.

As @poly says, if COVID is the primary factor then we’d expect a spike rather than an ongoing problem. Give it a couple of years to find out?

At the risk of just sounding like an old man, I do wonder how much is just PPP or, controversially, maybe we’re just raising a new generation of snowflakes 🙂

Schools were shut for far too long as were most walks of life. You reap what you sow. Many on here were all for closing everything down indefinitely by the way, even after the vaccine was rolled out. You know who you are. You can’t have it both ways. Many were and remain ignorant to the effects of locking people up in their homes for months on end and homed in on the fear and scaremongering tactics that were being driven by the media, much of which never materialised. The UK government has since admitted this albeit very quietly.

Hope all the fear mongering and finger pointing was worth it. People reporting neighbours for having the audacity to leave their house for more than an hour a day etc etc. Absolute dregs of society.

At the older end of this spectrum Covid changed my daughters education direction.

She was doing her A-Levels during covid and planning on the usual A-Levels > Uni route.

At the start of her 2nd A-Level year she came to us and said she wanted to quit and do an apprenticeship. Support from the school was terrible and she didn’t want to go to Uni under that same Covid cloud. We said she could as long as she found a course before quitting.

A week later she’d got herself an apprenticeship in Stable Yard Management with an ex Olympic medal winning rider. She’s spent 3.5 yrs living away from home as a groom doing very long hours ‘shovelling shit’. She’s matured so much and has just accepted a new job as a Yard Manager with another event rider – a very good salary for a 22yr old and free on-site accommodation.

For her Covid was a good thing – it made her realise the prescribed education route wasn’t what she wanted.

My sister-in-laws kids all seem to have done fine too. One is 21 and doing a railway engineering apprenticeship which a taking him all over the country. Her two twin daughters are just in the process of choosing Universities.

Common factor is parenting styles – they’ve all been bought up to sort themselves out.

I think COVID and social media have been the perfect storm.

I cant even begin to explain why COVID impacted on kids so much ie you would think being at home all day, less school work etc would be a bonus for them, but maybe it just confirms they need social interaction to develop as human beings.

It appears now that most early teens social life is on a phone, which is stressful / not real / not good for your mental health.

Snap Chat needs banning, or at least the element of getting a score for how many snaps you have sent per day, and a record for how many continuous days you have been on it.

It will be interesting when COVID kids turn in to adults. Will they be able to perform and function in the real world?

Unrealistic expectations of what the school can do to make up for their parenting shortfalls and the insistence that poor behaviour is a consequence of a learning difficulty are big challenges for her and the staff.

We are seeing a big increase in young people coming into our Scout group with additional needs. We try and accomodate to be inclusive but it puts a huge amount of extra work on our volunteers, and we’ve lost a couple because of it. It also has an impact on what units can get done. To get fair, most of the kids seem happy and accepting of others who are different, and the impacts.

but she’s convinced that PPP (piss poor parenting) is at the root of most children’s problems.

Probably also true! My lad has moved and helps at an oversubscribed Scout unit who are less “accommodating”, rightly or wrongly, and take a hard line excluding bad behaviour as spaces can be filled from the waiting list. He says the atmosphere and “productivity” at meetings is way ahead, but there’s concerns around what the excluded kids do next.

I ride with an inspirational primary head who has a school in a “challenging” area. He’s adamant that his biggest issue is parents attitude.

Parents tracking kids location on smartphones – to me – is an issue too.

Several of our friends still track their kids (and the kids are now in their early 20’s) – just seems very odd to us. There’s a reluctance to let kids go.

but she’s convinced that PPP (piss poor parenting) is at the root of most children’s problems.

I think we need to be careful about pointing the finger at individuals. If true, and it’s on this scale, then there’s a cultural problem that we are part of and all bare responsibility for.

It too easily becomes a convenient excuse to blame everyone but ourselves.

It appears now that most early teens social life is on a phone, which is stressful / not real / not good for your mental health.

I was thinking that the over-abundance of social media usage by parents was a factor as much as the kids, but then again there were always the folks who paid more attention to TV , football, the pub than their family it just seems there were fewer of those.

Very tough one

as a parent with 4 kids who were aged 5-11 when lcokdowns started, the homeschooling was tough, luckily my wife wasnt working and my work was split into shifts and I was on 2pm-8pm so could help homeschooling in the morning, were also lucky enough to have enough tablets/computers to do the online work. We also did mandatory daily family walks, like every day! around local area, lots of bike rides etc  again we were lucky that we could do this, but I think it really helped. Our neighbour is head of maths at our secondary school and she couldnt praise us enough for doing that (she set up a home gym in her garage for her 3 teenage sons, which she credits with keeping them all sane)

Even tho my youngest  were just starting school, I think that they seem to have been absolutely fine and are doing very well now academically, I also think with 3 siblings to play with our kids got plenty of interaction , but again single children families for example would have been much tougher

With my Cub Leader hat on…….. we have a few that are very poorly disciplined, is it worse than pre-covid?, no I really dont think so. there have always been little gits acting out, for whatever reasons!

With a one caveat, the single child kids do seem to have a bit less independence and confidence. But teaching independence and those kind of confidence building experiences is what cubs is good for imho.

Maybe being in a mostly middle class area our group selects for kids that fared better, as always its those at the bottom that get hit the most, saying that our schools had quite a lot of key worker kids in school and I know they tried to keep up food packages etc for those on free school meals.

I ride with an inspirational primary head who has a school in a “challenging” area. He’s adamant that his biggest issue is parents attitude.

I would add that this is definitely rings true and Im not sure if the perfect storm of covid & , ‘having enough of experts’ + social media etc has had a bigger effect on some parents being a major factor

Schools were shut for far too long as were most walks of life. You reap what you sow. Many on here were all for closing everything down indefinitely by the way, even after the vaccine was rolled out. You know who you are. You can’t have it both ways. Many were and remain ignorant to the effects of locking people up in their homes for months on end and homed in on the fear and scaremongering tactics that were being driven by the media, much of which never materialised. The UK government has since admitted this albeit very quietly.

without wishing to derail the thread, theres some truth in this, but a lot of ignorance & nonsense, if COVID came again tomorrow, we’d probably do something very similar, why?  because the NHS still could not cope with such a huge numbers , that really hasnt changed, Through my work I saw how many urgent cancer ops are cancelled because of a regular winter flu surge.

Schools could well stay open (and remember they were kept open for many key worker kids) BUT , COVID unlike regular flu didnt have mortality rates that hit the young the way they did the old .

As the inquiry has shown the government planned for the wrong pandemic (a more flu like one) but thats the problem with novel viruses, you never know their characteristics until theyve been studied.

What I would say is that schools are now better able to provide online teaching: all of my eldest 2s homework is online and all our parents evenings are now virtual, which is much easier, those first homeschool zoom class assemblies were chaos!!

(Our scout group went entirely online thanks to the hardwork of our GSL and unlike many groups we didnt lose kids or leaders, we did a weekly meet, virtual campouts and other activities)

Much of the damage we are seeing now is because our social safety net is already broken, theres no way it could cope with lockdowns, look at the insane ideological battle the government had with Marcus Rashford about feeding the least well off kids…

Piss poor teachers and a piss poor education system are a big part of the problem too. (Slightly tongue in cheek for the ppp brigade)

Whenever teachers complain about parenting skills, it amazes me that they don’t see a connection with education.

How many of you are aware of the funding situations state schools have to deal with? My kids’ “Ofsted Good” primary school is choosing between staffing and heating. They have £7000 (IIRC) to cover building maintenance this year for a 400 pupil school, and my son’s classes are currently being held in the school library because his classroom roof sprung a leak during the heavy rain last week. The head and deputy head are both teaching classes part time currently to cover maternity leaves, and the school has to deal with a disproportionate special educational needs burden because other local schools deliberately fail those kids so they end up at my kids’ school. Council understaffing has created unacceptable delays in SEN funding too, excacerbating everything. Education is in at least as bad a state as the NHS in England from what I see, but the consequences of the failure won’t really bite until a cohort reaches adulthood. It’s another austerity shitshow basically; Covid has certainly had impacts as in every other facet of life, but we should be resourcing dealing with and mitigating them and it’s really not clear that we are.

Whenever teachers complain about parenting skills, it amazes me that they don’t see a connection with education.

Chicken and egg – it’s now multi generational. Grandparents didn’t get a great education,  weren’t great parents to their kids and had no ambitions for their kids to do better, who didn’t get a great education who became worse parents to the poor kids who are struggling now.

The solution will be multi generational as well, but that doesn’t fit with neat 5 year election cycles and no party is prepared to set a long term vision.

There’s a reluctance to let kids go.

I witness some of this with the wife. Our kids are 11 and 9, she’s still happy to do absolutely everything for them.  They’re never made to pick up stuff they throw on the floor, get themselves a drink when they want one etc. It’s infuriating.

As poly says, if COVID is the primary factor then we’d expect a spike rather than an ongoing problem. Give it a couple of years to find out?

I’ve heard lots of teachers talking about a spike or wave but it’s all anecdotal.

At my daughter’s primary her year (Yr 4) is an absolute bucket of ****bags compared to anything the school has ever seen. The theory seems to be the young ones were really affected by school closures as they missed the early fundamentals.

Whenever teachers complain about parenting skills, it amazes me that they don’t see a connection with education.

The link is that parenting skills really aren’t taught anywhere. It actually seems a bit pointless doing it at high school as parenthood is a long time away for most high school pupils then once that opportunity to teach it is gone there really isn’t another one.

The theory seems to be the young ones were really affected by school closures as they missed the early fundamentals.

Sample size of one (well, OK, 2) and so on but my youngest niece is / was definitely more affected than her older sister. That age group of about 4-5 during Covid missed all the early bonding and development.

I think it would be hard to split direct effects from Covid and the increase in the use of social media and apps like tik-tok, as well as the decrease in children out playing. I’m always trying to get my kids out the house, but they’re so reluctant. I was never in when I was a kid.

It’s another austerity shitshow basically;

I absolutely agree with this and as usual it’s the most vulnerable that suffer the most.

Striking teachers probably has more of an impact on them tbacp

FYFY

The link is that parenting skills really aren’t taught anywhere. It actually seems a bit pointless doing it at high school as parenthood is a long time away for most high school pupils then once that opportunity to teach it is gone there really isn’t another one

i seem to remember our school did have some element of parenting classes (but more how to keep them alive than actually raise them well)… but then we did have quite a few who were parents by the time they left!  That actually seems to be something where there has been a “positive” shift.

Sometimes we, at a small rural primary school , put the increasingly poor behaviour and social skills down to Covid but to be honest it is mostly crap parenting. The child who is always 15 minutes late in because mum overslept. At least he gets his time at school because she is always 15 minutes late collecting him. The parents who boys badger them for attention whilst the class teacher is giving the daily report of the child’s misdeeds. The kids need a bollocking not laughter. How about the kids who won’t bring a bottle of water to school as they can’t afford a  bottle but have a bottle of fancy e-numbers for lunch despite it being banned.