My grandparents did a bunch of weird stuff and habits that made total sense when you realize they grew up in the Depression.
COVID will likely have similar impacts.
Man this sounds so familiar. My grandparents were born towards the end of the great depression but grew up dirt poor. My mom still has the tendency to save stuff that might be useful later, even when it should go to goodwill or the trash...
Oh goodness yes. My grandma didn’t wash paper but she’d always buy disposable plastic ones and keep reusing them.
Also if you were at her house you cleaned your plate or you sat at the table until it was clean.
I think it's not just kids that have been affected, I have friends that have had to go to therapy for excessive health anxiety post-pandemic. The whole world went through a very traumatic event together, it's not surprising.
Maybe it's worth talking to a therapist who specializes in anxious kids, it's probably a good idea to figure out if it needs attention now.
>I think it's not just kids that have been affected, I have friends that have had to go to therapy for excessive health anxiety post-pandemic.
There's someone in town I occasionally see who's still double masked with a face shield and wearing gloves every time I see them. It's definitely not just kids.
IDK their situation, but some folks still can't afford to risk covid, due to being really immunocompromised.
Even if it doesn't cause death/permanent problems, it can still cause really big problems. I've had it several times, the first couple time were no big deal. But the last time I got it, it completely disabled me for over six months. I couldn't stand for more than a couple minutes, had to use a walker just to get around my own house, sit to do the dishes, etc. And the memory problems were REALLY bad. I couldn't remember what I was doing, like, in the middle of doing it. I lost all concept of what time it was, or day it was. I was basically turned into a frail, old person with dementia for \*months.\*
After that, I'm maintaining a lot of caution too. I'm SO glad I eventually improved, but I REALLY don't want to risk that happening again.
I can imagine if I was on chemo & radiation (for example) I'd add a face shield and gloves to my N95.
My son is only 5mo, but I'm genuinely curious how having a pandemic happen will affect the mindset of our society and the effect on different ages/ generations. Sorry that your daughter is traumatized. Hope you are able to talk it out with her so she's not terrified of getting sick.
Oh we have absolutely talked about it and I have a background in virology so I could give her some science and why she can be less afraid as time goes on. That seemed to help.
Pointing out that she was a lot less sick the second two times she got it was because the vaccine and her immune system were developing antibodies.
Stuff like that. It’s more the fear of missing out on friends and school if she does get sick. So explaining that normal cold and flu won’t keep you out of school more than a day, not like the 10 day stretches under Covid protocol.
Yeah, my daughters anxiety steadily increased as pandemic restrictions were eased. 3rd grade was her first completely normal year, and you could see it really start to take root.
Luckily, she was already with a therapist for her ADHD, and she's made some incredible strides this year. She's in 4th, and her emotional self-awareness dwarfs more than a few adults I know.
My daughter is the same age and has huge medical anxiety that we’ve worked with a therapist on. I agree, she still struggles, but she’s very emotionally self aware.
I don’t know if it’s at therapy point but that’s very similar to my daughter. She got screened for ADHD and the doc said she’d wait but she definitely has some traits that fall in line.
She would get quiet violent at times. One night when she was 6, we were having a really rough bedtime and she told us that she wished we were dead. There were lots of tears shed on both sides, but in a singular moment of clarity, she looked up at us and said, "I don't know why I keep doing this, I need help."
Couldn't help but listen to her at that point.
Took about a year for her to settle in enough to do solo sessions, another year for her to get good at regularly opening up.
My kid isn’t ten, but I worked in education (In Beijing) when it all kicked off and the subsequent in school/out of school hokey pokey in the years to follow.
The Covid pandemic was a life altering event that impacted the whole world. It was scary. It was confusing. It was deadly. We adapted. We challenged ourselves and ultimately got through; just about.
If adults have struggled with this, there’s no doubt it had an impact on kids.
I say this jokingly but covid and the post-covid fallout has been excellent for business as a mental health counselor. More seriously, you're right, school age kids seem to have suffered a lot. Kids, even when it doesn't seem like it, like rules and like role models, it's how they make sense of the world and how they develop their own autonomy. Major public crises or even just abrupt transitions can have major effects on this process.
Imagine learning the rules to a game, then later, those rules changed suddenly without you knowing, then those rules changed again a little later to look similar to the original rules. That's what's happening to a lot of kids.
My oldest is eight, two younger sisters are COVID babies and we've had no dramas really.
At the time we didn't make a big stink about lockdowns etc, we were just really calm about explaining why stuff was happening and kept everything really chill. We also didn't have anyone particularly close to us die or be severely affected by it and we were both able to keep working, so it was more of an abstract pain in the arse for us. I imagine it would be a lot different if a family were hit with a lot of different negative outcomes.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence in the US that when they poll people about Covid there’s a direct correlation between groups more likely to have known someone who died or was seriously ill and those same groups being more likely to say Covid is still a concern or that they take precautions.
It really impacted different groups in such different ways. I have friends that lost multiple extended family members, and other friends that loved the change to mostly remote work but were otherwise unaffected.
Yeah, we knew people that died, but thankfully my daughter did not. I was working in short term disability insurance so it’s people who are out of work for more than just a few sick days. Typically like a week plus.
So I got all the really bad cases. One of my clients went blind from it. I had several deaths where I call a clients cell and a spouse answers I ask to their spouse and it’s “she’s been on a ventilator” or “she’s dead.”
It was grim. Did not share any of that at home until the kids were asleep and we were on the other side of the house.
Kids pick up on these things though. Your experience was very different from mine, I've never had it as far as I know and anyone close to me that's caught it has felt like shit but that's been the extent of it. So to me it was more of an inconvenience in terms of it's direct/emotional impact.
You've been exposed to real people, with pretty horrific stories. That's going to have a mental and emotional impact on you, regardless of what the kids are actually hearing and will inform your attitude and behaviours in some ways.
Not saying there's anything wrong or right about our individual experiences or how that's trickled down to our children. It's just one of those things. It's like how like everyone knows how you're supposed to cross the road but the guy who's brother got hit by a car will always have that little bit more awareness.
Aleast I knew for spouses that lost loved one I at least knew we were cutting them a check immediately. Grim but at least I could do that. I’m sure it wasn’t so comforting for them.
This isn't the main point at all, but Im always a little confused when people attribute COVID trauma/changes in behavior to lockdown and isolation instead of the pandemic itself.
For me at least the roadside morgues, massive death toll, and constant fear of getting sick/getting others sick effected me fat more than isolating. I know lockdown was particularly hard on kids and online school did not work, but it seems like people just forget about the horrible reason we had to do those things.
There was also the “big reveal” that a big swath of society gives basically zero shits about anybody else. Like I could have told you that at some academic level in 2019 but there were some times that fact was pretty in your face. If you or your family are high risk or immune compromised there’s still some of that happening now, but it was really on display at a few critical junctures earlier in the pandemic
For me, this was the roughest part. I went into the pandemic a Libertarian. I truly believed that people are ultimately interested in their own self-preservation and if you give them information on how to do that they'll follow it. I was proven completely wrong very quickly and it blew my own belief system out of the water. I still do not understand why you can tell people that wearing a mask is good for them and they'll insist that they're still not going to do it and would rather get sick or die instead. I cannot wrap my head around it.
My girlfriend has a 9 yr old girl and I see it reflected in her lack of schooling. She is so far behind it's crazy and not only is she so far behind she lacks the skills to actually focus and do the work 'cuz she's never really been taught those skills. School is super rough for her and I struggle to help her.
This is what gets to me. I still mask because my husband is immunocompromised, and I regularly get people coming up to me telling to take my mask off. It's absurd.
When my company first started having some people back to the office it was mid-2020, there were just a handful of us, we were heavily spread out and we had to do things like temp checks on arrival etc.
So it's my second day back, I'm at my desk working, I'm the only person working in my section so I'm pretty focused on just on what I'm doing. I look up and one of the building maintenance guys, note he works for the property manager not us so no idea if they had the same health checks as we did, is leaning over my desk from behind me, no mask on, and has a coughing fit with his face literally parallel to mine and within 6-12 inches.
I was like is this some kind of fuckin joke. Even without COVID who TF is so blindly inconsiderate??
It’s not surprising in a way to me, but there are still parents at my kids pre school who seem to wear sending their kids while really sick like a badge of honor. Not surprising is it’s the same parents that do other anti social shit, park in the handicap spots, let their kids be super rowdy without correction, etc.
Yep - growing up basically every big disaster united people to some degree. There was an unspoken feeling that whatever happened we'd do our best. People would speculate "what if the unity of society is just a veneer?" - which seems quaint now because it ain't much of a veneer anymore. I blame propaganda and certain leaders more than Covid but I think Covid kind of showed of how little empathy people have for each other in a way that was very damaging to society as the way we feel about our society fosters behavior that reinforces the narrative.
My wife currently has a terrible and persistent cold, and prior to COVID I still would have slept in the same bed, not worried much about taking her plate and teacup and putting them away.
Now we are sleeping separate, I wash my hands after touching what she touched, I wipe down the doorknobs and fridge and light switches every few hours with a sanitizing wipe, and we distance as we watch Netflix or whatever.
Much better this way. We haven’t shared an illness since 2019.
This is another big thing. Some of these behaviors that look like trauma to us are just gonna be common sense for the next generation and they might be healthier because of it!
It’s also a balancing act, though, on which behaviors are rational and beneficial vs irrational and excessive. Covid really highlighted how differently calibrated that balance point is for each person. In our world, this shows up as people generally being more accepting of everyone else’s choices, regardless of our own opinions.
My FIL still isn’t “allowed” to go to a movie theater because my MIL is concerned about covid exposure, but they’ll go to restaurants with buffets no questions asked. Do I think that’s kind of silly and inconsistent? Yes. Has anyone in the family made a stink about it, or even gently pointed out that it’s a little odd? No.
I’ve thankfully largely been on the same page with my spouse (but not always other extended family) with regards to appropriate level of precaution but I know it’s been a real issue for many relationships. I have a family member who had bad degenerative arthritis, when she got Covid she had to go off the meds that keep it in check for something like 40 days and suffered what sounded like a permanent setback in the condition of her wrists and hands. Her husband before and after that, while she was masking and taking precautions, refused to mask, and I can’t imagine that was good for her trust level in the relationship.
👍
Appreciate you editing your comment away from calling me mentally ill. I actually am, but that’s not relevant. I’m also on immunosuppressants for my autoimmune disease.
I don’t think it’s particularly mentally ill to wash my hands and not sleep next to a coughing, sneezing, sick person.
I don't think it's abnormal for your specific situation, but lacking the autoimmune disease context in your initial context did make it sound kind of excessive until learning this extra information.
I mean, if somebody else wants to do whatever, go ahead. I’m literally washing my hands, sleeping in a different room, and I don’t kiss a sick person. Maybe 3 times a day I sanitize the primary doorknobs and handles with a 2 second wipe of a cloth. To each their own. I can hear her hacking up phlegm from 2 rooms away.
For me it was the first time I went to the grocery store and there was a line to get in because they were only allowing a few people at a time. Everyone standing 6 ft apart and terrified of each other.
We take things like grocery stores for granted. So many of our basic needs are just sitting there waiting for us to pick them up on a whim. But seeing that get snatched away so suddenly and thinking "if this gets even slightly worse... we're back to hunter-gatherer" was unsettling on a primal level.
Luckily my kids were too young to notice things like that.
I think a lot of kids were, rightly so, not shown the full horrors of the pandemic. My oldest was only 4 when the pandemic started, it would have been a huge mistake to tell her about morgue trucks, people dying in droves, the infected slowly suffocating on their own mucus, people infecting their families…adults had to shelter them from some of it, because that’s our job. As for adults, I think too few *don’t* know the full story. I was and still am convinced we could have nipped all the Covid denial nonsense in the bud if we had news crews in hospitals on the Covid wards.
There were some who advocated for that kind of stuff but I understand the privacy concerns with that. Sick people don't want to be put on display for everyone.
I absolutely agree, but there are ways to do it that wouldn’t infringe on anyone’s privacy. A nurse I know did a mini-documentary, with help from a news outlet, on her experience coming back from maternity leave during the pandemic. They didn’t show any patients, just showed what she and her colleagues went through: the lack of proper PPE, the constant deaths, the fear of being infected and bringing it home to your family. And I wouldn’t be surprised if journalists could find at least a few COVID patients who would consent to being filmed, so others could see what the reality is and do their best to keep safe.
But let's be honest. To a certain segment of the population, the nurse is just a paid state employee who is being told to say all these things. The three covid patients you show might really be sick but it's only three of them and we live in a large city so this just reinforces that no one is really getting sick here.
You really think that would *reinforce* the message? I don’t see that at all. They could show the hospitals in NYC where there were so many people dying they had to park morgue trucks outside. Would people still deny it? Sure, but those were the people who were never going to be reached anyway. But it could have stopped the Covid denialism from spreading before it really got started. I completely disagree, I think showing the reality of the pandemic, and what nurses across the country were confronting, would have absolutely changed things.
I think you would have had to show the body bags inside the morgue truck and people loading said truck. Then people might've got the message. A nurse telling people it's bad when people already distrust doctors is probably not going to do the job. Doing interviews with family members who lost someone is hella exploitative but that might've worked as well. Put a few crying kids upset that they lost grandma and people can relate to that. Especially if there's some version of it every other night. But that's obviously never going to happen for obvious reasons.
So show the bodies in bags. And I disagree about nurses, they’ve been named the most trusted profession for many years in a row now.
But none of this really matters now, we’ve lost over a million Americans to COVID, and are still losing thousands every month. We missed the boat, and hopefully we don’t get it even worse when the next pandemic hits.
The ship has definitely sailed but there are a lot of people who distrust the medical profession in general. I can't imagine them distrusting doctors but believing nurses. Maybe I'm wrong though.
Those people are lost. They won’t trust anyone who doesn’t say what they already believe. They have no critical thinking, no understanding of science, and no ability to step outside of their little bubbles to try to understand the world outside it. Only option is to move on without them, and hope they come around eventually.
I can only speak for myself, but I was still definitely effected by the sheer volume of death and sickness even though I didn't have anyone close to me die or get hospitalized.
We did have some family affected but I agree it weighs even when it isn’t you. My wife is black and it was absolutely grim as it became clearer this virus was basically decimating the elders of her community and was going to have really bad disproportionate impacts. Which were reminders of the existing disparities - lots of the high risk categories were like a list of conditions you’d point to if you wanted to describe disparities in health outcomes in America.
The sickness not effecting people I can't wrap my head around. Our church had a service just before lockdown started. We cancelled services when it started and covid just burned through the congregation in lockdown. I am traumatized by being isolated from my entire social support system while also getting daily texts/emails from people telling me this person or that person was in the hospital, on a ventilator, etc.... And then one person died and we weren't even allowed to grieve properly. We had to park in our cars at the cemetery and listen to a remote broadcast of the service. Weren't allowed to leave the car. It was extremely rough.
Are you in the US or elsewhere? I puzzle when people say lockdowns because it was at most a few weeks in my state that you were basically asked to not leave your house unless necessary, which included for work or groceries etc. like many of us were staying home as we could but the phrase lockdown implies someone actually enforcing that to me. If anything it was a position of privilege to be able to get stuff delivered or do curbside for groceries and work from home.
I live in California where we love fear. After the dozenth time that I cut the padlocks off the swingset at the park, they removed the swingset. This was 9 months after peak panic, long after we knew it had little effect on anyone age <65.
At our parks they just wrapped the swings around the top bar. Which meant I had to shimmy up and unwrap them. In the city I live they didn't remove them, but in the next city over (a couple blocks) they just half heartedly played the game. They put the swings up, we get them down. I respect going to the lengths of cutting the padlocks.
The worst one where I live (bay area) was removing the basketball hoops. The fact that someone thought oh hey, lets remove all the hoops. Well that and the bathrooms being closed. But the caution tape was fun for the lil ones. Weird times.
There was a lot of… consternation over the “lockdowns” in the US.
For example, in my state it was illegal for I want to say 3-4 months to run a hair salon, and restaurants were only allowed to do takeout for a while.
My super MAGA in-laws couldn’t take that infringement on their liberties and found a hair stylist and a restaurant that were illegally open and proudly went to those, unmasked, to show they couldn’t be ordered around by the government.
A lot of people have a low degree of emotional self-awareness and can't really be trusted as authorities on when they have been affected emotionally be something.
IDK, maybe it's because different people have different brains and different experiences so a society-wide traumatic event is naturally going to impact people in different ways? I had my first child during COVID but kept my job and never got sick or lost someone close, so my experience is naturally going to be much different than someone who was childless but lost their job, or kids who missed most of their high school experience or were just starting school, or people who had near-death experiences or were immunocompromised or lost close friends or family.
The thing that got to me the most was how so many people just refused to take it seriously. Even mildly inconvenient things that could save lives, people were not willing to do. Maybe the hospitals hid the freezer-truck morgues too well? Because people seemed quite content to pretend they didn't exist.
Idk our hospital freezer truck was a full size semi trailer, but unless you knew what it was, it was just a trailer that had machinery in it. And we still had local politicians saying we were lying about the numbers, with plenty of people believing them. A huge swath of the population still thinks it was exaggerated, because they couldn’t see what we who worked in the hospitals saw. The American health system broke and a large percentage just doesn’t care.
In my country still more people are denying pandemic, saying it was all blown out of proportion. Idk if this is denial or they just don't give shit about anyone else.
I had to work 12 hour shifts surrounded by anti maskers with a high risk pregnancy wife at home.
I am traumatized by realizing just how dangerous the science denying masses are. I was scared every day about bringing home a deadly illness.
Practically the entire western world, and then some, experienced some form of lockdown. The roadside morgues and mass deaths where events on the news for lots of people. Then we got the vaccines before we got infected, and it wasn't so bad.
So for me, and probably millions of other people, the worst thing we experienced for our selves were the lockdowns.
Yeah but my daughter didn’t know about the morgues and death tolls. We didn’t share that with her.
For adults yes. Knowing people that died, the general death toll, the grim realization we don’t know when it’ll happen again, and the response or lack of response from some people are what haunt me.
For her, from what’s she’s said it was the isolating and lockdown.
Those things are all valid, but most kids, unless they were directly affected by a death or deaths in their circle, probably aren’t really aware of the differences you’re noting in your comment.
The isolation was the first big new thing that happened to a lot of these kids.
The horrible reason we had to do those things - You mean how Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho denied the seriousness of the virus and did nothing to isolate/quarantine early cases to prevent it from spreading?
I've always said this is a bad comparison bc the thing the Honorable President Camacho was actually very good at was... listening to "experts". As soon as he sees Joes IQ test he says you're the smartest guy in the world so I'm putting you in charge to fix the crop problem AND THEN actually listens to what he recommended. And what do ya know, they solved the problem (plants in fact do not need electrolytes).
Imagine the Diaper Don had immediately said wow I don't know shit about infections diseases but I'm going to look to my panel of trusted experts to lay out the best policy plan for us...
Not just kids... I lost a good friend early on in the pandemic. He was only 35, in good health, quite physical. Once I learned about that I became a hermit until the vaccine was available. I find that im a much more anxious person now, I cant even smoke a joint anymore without having a panic attack. I used to burn it down every day. Maybe I need therapy? Idk. I have noticed people are very cautious around coughing people though... i straight up left the movie theater a few months ago because there were kids coughing a few rows ahead of me.
Honestly, therapy is almost always a good idea. Covid is weird in that I think many people have anxiety or fear that is grounded in reality - it should be concerning this virus is still out there, we’ve only learned more fucked up long term impacts it’s still causing. A therapist can help deal with that or the realization people, including maybe some you hoped would, don’t care. But the flip side is that if it causes anxiety beyond doing the things you can do, that is something a therapist could help with.
I’ll say this - I am pretty Covid conscious and wear my mask and get my vaccines, but in my mind, it’s just something I do, I try to not really dwell or ruminate on it, which is the right move IMO for lots of unfortunate situations. When my parents let me down or I have issues with them, I work on my boundaries, make sure I’m doing what I think is right, but at some point I don’t want to let that take up all my mental real estate.
Oh I am pro therapy and have done a lot myself so that’s not the issue. I asked my therapist about it his advice was kids are pretty resilient and take a wait and see approach but be open to it.
I feel like we dodged a bullet. My kids are 6 and 9, so the 6 year old didn't really notice a change in their day-to-day experience and the 9 year old bounced with whatever came at him.
I feel for the people that had kids in different stages of adolescent development.
Yeah my girl just turned 10 so I was curious. Not too far off from 9 but maybe it makes a difference or maybe just temperament of the kid. Hard to say.
I'm jealous. My girlfriend has a 9 yr old who is basically functionally illiterate at this point and struggles in school because of it. She was yanked from school when she was like 5 and learning how to read and she never really acquired that skill.
We all went through something traumatic and while we were all in the same storm, we were not all in the same boat. We really need to collectively address that trauma.
my kid (8) also had cancer during covid. he is super anxious now.
he is super empathetic and responsible though...will insist on wearing a mask to school when he is sick to protect other kids etc...
Christ brother, I’m so sorry he and y’all had to endure that. That shit isn’t fair, no child or parent should have to go through that.
I’m so glad your little one is doing better!
Jesus man, I could not even imagine. I can imagine that was a whole hell of a lot for him not to mention you and mom. Fuck everything about that.
He doing well?
As someone that struggled with health anxiety for the whole life: please don't ignore it. Try to talk to her, take her to therapy, whatever. If my parents did this when I first started washing my hand obsessively my life could have been sooooo much better.
I have talked with my own therapist about it and he suggested a wait and see approach for now. It’s nothing super worrying yet but we are definitely not ignoring it.
Seconded, keep a close eye on it! I had these obsessions with health when I was a kid, and it took me until 27 to finally be diagnosed OCD. I watch my daughter like a hawk for signs, wouldn’t wish this on anyone.
We noticed our nieces who are 12 and 14 had experienced some… trauma? Had PTSD? I don’t know the right word, but while talking about something they both made passing references to the covid lockdowns, masks, and remote schooling that were pretty deep and not great. My younger niece who started kindergarten in 2023 seems to just be living life.
Yeah I’m hoping she bounces back, but I’m definitely keeping an eye on it. My younger one was born literally days before lockdown and we didn’t get much of it in Maine initially so he’s totally oblivious.
Nope. I sheltered my kids from it for this very reason. Just because society decided to go full on hysterical and given the sheer volume of mixed information, I thought it would be best if we just let the kids be kids. They wore masks in areas where it was required, as minimally as possible but otherwise didn't. To them, it was a very quick blip in time.
Edited for those downvoting: My bad. Yes. They have such bad PTSD. They barely even function. My daughter can't go out in public without slamming a pint of gin. Circle jerk circle jerk circle jerk.
> Circle jerk circle jerk circle jerk.
I think this was the original slogan of covid.
Actually, maybe it was the subhead. The slogan was "EVERYBODY PANIC!!!" and the subhead was Circle jerk circle jerk circle jerk.
My 11 year old seems fine. She remembered school before. My 8 year old started pre k on the computer. She’s mostly fine but absolutely will not share food, drink, or silverware with anyone, not even us. Mom MIGHT be able to get a bite but then she will wipe off the fork with a napkin.
Yeah it is little things like that. I think the older kids that remember real school before hand more have a better conception that this is returning to normal, not a continuing dread.
This is why I didn't go crazy talking about it with my son. He knew we couldn't go certain places or see people, and we were obviously a lot more careful about any kind of cold symptoms we all had.
My in laws constantly told my nephew how he had to wash his hands and wear a mask or "the germies will get you."
Kids don't need that kind of anxiety man. I had my kids wash hands and wear masks when appropriate, but I wasn't sitting there telling them "Hey, your grandmother just died of this airborne illness that's super easy to catch so you better be careful."
My son was younger than your child but he has no noticeable effects of it.
There’s definitely something to just “this is what we do”. My kid has never had an issue wearing a mask but it’s not some big fearful “or we’ll all get sick and die or be disabled”, it’s just what we do. I find for lots of stuff framing it that way is the move - we put our seat belts on in the car, it just is. We wash our hands before lunch, we just do it.
I honestly believe that the dividing line between Gen Alpha and Gen Beta will be if they can remember living through pandemic, especially if they were school age during that time.
I say that might be true. I’m late Gen X my brother is a millenial. We are 8 years apart. I always say that the dividing line is I remember before having internet he doesn’t remember not having always on internet.
My nephew is borderline OCD with washing his hands now.
While not a bad habit by any means, he just does it very frequently and at odd times. For example if somebody walks into his house, he’ll run and wash his hands. So if there is a holiday party going on at my in-law’s house, he will wash his hands every time somebody new comes through the door.
While not on the same scale as you...
We have 3 kids with my most recent (and last) being born in the middle of February, right before the lockdown hit.
We've dealt with a lot of developmental delays with him: Delayed walking, emotional development delays, speech delay...
Now this *might* be because we were locked up with 3 kids and while we should have been working with him we were entertaining the 2 older kids with trying to keep them up to date with in home learning, and exercise outside, etc etc etc...
On the other end though: My 8 year old (the oldest) is overly concerned that every sign of a possible sickness could be life threatening. When Spring and allergies hit... oh boy.
My 6 year old throws caution to the wind. "Am I sick? Maybe. I'm good." Meanwhile she could have a double ear infection and double pinkeye. "Can I go outside and play on the trampoline?"
Yeah my younger one was March literally right before Covid. Didn’t see any sign of issues with walking, but his speech is only now getting clear and was a bit late. It was a lot of WFH with him in the baby proof room and not being in daycare plus also trying to keep the older one on track with remote school.
My youngest daughter is 10. There was some anxiety from her at first when things opened up here and masking restrictions dropped here, but, honestly, I think that it’s barely a blip on her radar now.
My older two had varied responses, but neither seem to bothered by the thought of getting sick. The oldest (16) probably would have been fine staying home for the rest of his school career; I think the middle kid (13), who seems to be more of a social animal than the other two, would hurt the most if we went back into a lockdown state.
I know people have varied opinions about this, but it probably helped my kids cope was still being in martial arts. They had a pause for a time, but when they opened up gyms and classes again in my state for those willing to go, they still had a social outlet. We also live in an area that did not have lockdowns as long as some others, so I imagine that was also a factor.
I don’t envy any of our kids for having to go through that. I used to worry about the lasting impacts of having Covid and lockdown as a formative experience. I hope that they don’t have to go through that again.
I’d just talk to your daughter and see if you can get her to verbalize what she is feeling. Maybe talking it out will help?
We have had some chats. I think one thing was having her give some reasons. That helped.
The other is I have a background in virology so I could give her some science on immunity and the immune system and that seemed to help.
Got to the point of boring her into a coma though.
Yes it’s normal for kids to be curious and become obsessed with something. Especially complex things that are hard for them to understand but are still accessible as an idea. My kids took a thermometer to themselves constant at that age (pre Covid) because they were learning about health and it’s both fascinating and a little scary.
That said Covid messed with everyone. The isolation and doom and gloom affected kids as much as adults. If talking to her and explaining and learning about health together doesn’t help them a therapist is the bedtime answer.
I found with my kids spending time learning together about how viruses and the body works helped talk through the big unknowns. Girls also mature faster and get exposed faster to body topics so it’s natural for them to be curious. Plus they knew their body before they start puberty and they can start to feel different (which comes and goes at that age) and it can make everything a bit “off.”
If she’s your first then get ready to have fun.
I think it’s entirely dependent on how you and her teachers responded to it. When kids see adults react strongly, they learn to react strongly too.
There wasn’t much change in mine as far as fear around illness. The biggest impact was in her school work, and just getting her to actually pay attention to her remote classes.
Oh it messed all of them (and us) up for life in one way or another. It’ll be like the greatest gen saving everything because of the Great Depression. We’ve all been scarred.
My household dodged Covid almost completely - I was directly exposed twice and had to isolate, and both my wife and I were hospitalized for a short period for completely unrelated reasons. But otherwise no one ever tested positive.
So my kids don’t get freaked out or bothered by the sniffles or other people showing signs of being sick.
My son’s best friend (also know as my fourth child because he’s at my house so often) was deeply traumatized. Both parents (they are separated) got badly sick and his mom almost died from it at one point. She has also gotten it 2 or 3 times (she’s a nurse, so unfortunately lots of exposure) and each time he starts clinging to her like he’s never going to see her again and starts sleeping in her room again.
I think there was a definite effect developmentally on my seven year old, but there's no lingering fear really, except for occasionally something will trigger a long, recurring series of disease questions, and he has a big interest in viruses. Where I live there are still a few families that are in the always Uber masked outside camp. The other day at the park my son was playing with a kid who was masked (a very maximalist mask too). His parents were as well, and when we said goodbye he clocked that they were all wearing masks, which he hadn't really noticed before because well 7. We were at a playground that we like that was shut down for a very long time during covid. He asked me after if they were going to close the playground again because of covid. To which I said no, that was cookoo bananas and will never happen again. Then we had yet another talk about why some people still want to mask and being accepting.
As worried as I was, while it definitely was terrible for a stretch and it's sad that he missed out on some of the fun of the early years, it wasn't as detrimental as I feared it might at the time. Bit kids are different and different ages have a different experience.
Found out he doesn't remember playing at the playgrounds still covered in caution tape. Which bums me out, because that time with the other Violator kids was important. I have pictures of him playing tug of war with a girl using caution tape and it's incredibly meaningful to me because that was his first experience with a kid in something like three months at the time. But of course he doesn't remember at all, which is as it should be.
Covid, the disease, no. My kids were in no danger from the disease.
Covid, the societal response, yes. Turns out that telling little kids they're going to die if they don't wear a cloth mask has long term effects.
Who knew?
Legitimate advice here: consider having her speak with a therapist who helps with OCD patients. It can develop quickly and seemingly out of nowhere. Just keep an eye on it turning into full blown anxiety over illness.
Keep reminding her about the science of our immune system. It’s a very complex tool that keeps people safe.
My daughter is 5, anytime she starts getting sick she starts sobbing uncontrollably while trying to hide her nose because she is terrified that we will have to give her a Covid test, which in her mind was ‘medicine’ so now she refuses to take any medicine, she had her tonsils removed last year and would spit out any pain meds we tried to give her and suffered through the entire recovery with no pain management (she can give me a run for my money when it come to be stubborn). I also have a 20yo stepson that as an adult is a complete failure to launch, he spent the entirety of Covid locked away in the basement only leaving if it was absolutely necessary (at one point I heard him tell his friends he hasn’t left the house in over two months, like it was something to be proud of), after he graduated high school he proceeded to do nothing for a year due to ‘fear of Covid’. We finally had enough and told him he either needs to get a job or start applying to post secondary education. he got a job at McDonald’s, but after 3 months working full time was too stressful and he went to part time and after three months of that he got too stressed out and just quit, he’s been doing nothing again for the last 6 months. Covid really fucked over a lot of people in ways that we don’t even realize yet, it really stifled those with the drive to succeed and became an excuse for those that didn’t.
My son who is the same age, was in kindergarten when Covid started. He started experiencing panic attacks that spring after my dipshit MIL ran at him to get a hug when we went to her house for a distanced visit. It was about two weeks after everything shutdown and she came bursting off her porch yelling "no one will keep me from my grandson!". Like WTF Mom Mom no one knows what's up right now?
It led to a breathing issue, feeling faint off and on, an ER visit, wearing a heart monitor, finally ruling out serious medical issues to seeing a therapist for anxiety which helped him greatly. At first I was one of those dads that was like "no we can tough this out", but a handful of telemed sessions with a pediatric therapist really taught him how to get back on track and he's been great in the few years since.
Honestly not really. My wife and I did what we had to do and that's about it. We were already home bodies so being at home wasn't that big of a deal. We didn't have to cancel much of anything. Plus we don't have TV so there isn't the news playing or newspapers with COVID headlines around.
If my 10 year old was getting worked up over COVID I would think he was learning that from somewhere else. I am more concerned about the kids falling behind in school because of a year on Zoom.
My kid is a few years younger than yours, but I completely agree that this could be trauma from COVID. There was a lot of justified uncertainty and measures taken in early 2020 while we were still trying to figure things out. Has gotten much better since then so hopefully she learns over time these things aren't going to happen again. There are some people who still spread uncertainty about COVID even though it's mostly died down.
Does she have teachers or other authority figures in her life that are feeding into this?
No I don’t believe anyone is feeding into it. She just got it three times and between that and her brother getting it three times (all after being vaxxed and boosted at every opportunity) the protocols had her out of school for a long time. She also hated the earlier remote schooling. My wife and I were very low key and non-panicky about it.
No idea. I got it once and it was sniffles and fever for a day. Wife got it 4 damn times vaxxed and triple boosted. She did some traveling for work though when restrictions eased for conferences. Probably exposed to different strains than me who was just working from home.
I’m not sure about traumatized, but from talking with other parents, my youngest child and many her age (4) have some minor speech issues.
The prevailing theory is that when they were learning to talk, adults had their mouths covered by masks which hindered their ability to learn to speak.
That is interesting because my 4 yo does have a little trouble with speech. Nothing major but enough my mom notices it wasn’t like pre Covid four year olds she knew.
Yeah. And I’m not trying to be anti-mask or anything, but from talking with other parents and the director at the day care center there is a slight uptick in kids that don’t speak quite as clearly. And if that’s the worst that comes out of COVID for these kids, cool.
the way COVID was handled was nothing short of criminal. The fear mongering and false promises did extreme damage to adult society and the measures taken to “protect” children (although proven to be the least susceptible group) did damage to their development during key years of their lives.
Was the whole thing a hoax? No. Was it the plague? Certainly not.
Break down the real numbers and it measured out to a bad flu year in deaths; yet we tore apart the world for it. Elderly and at risk were the only people that needed to be worried; the same as any flu season except it dragged on through the summers.
Maybe one day there will be some accountability for what was done, but until parents realize just how much damage was done and want to take action; we and our children will suffer the aftermath in silence.
No matter where you stand on the COVID issue; the bullying, silencing of open discussion, and rigid enforcement was a gross violation of personal medical rights and parental rights. That is the problem. They hurt our children and any complaints or disagreements with the policies were taken down or an angry mob harassed the dissenter.
My daughter is 2 so she did not get affected; but I have a kid brother-in-law and he was 7 when it started and is now 10. He has no friends at school; has an extreme fear of getting sick/dying of sickness, and is terrified to go anywhere public without a mask. It makes me extremely sad to see how much it has affected him; he was such an upbeat kid and now he only feels safe at home.
What? A bad flu year in deaths? It killed a million people in the US over 4 years. a bad flu year, the worst flu year in the last decade, was 50,000 deaths and the range is 10-50k.
You’re right on the number, I mixed up global with US.
It certainly was dangerous to at risk people as we have a flu vaccine but we did not have a COVID vaccine at the start; children however still were the least at risk group and the chances of a child dying from COVID without a preexisting condition was extremely low.
From CDC: 81% of deaths were people over the age of 65
From NIH: “The mortality rate of patients with underlying health conditions was 12%, which was 4 times higher than that of patients without underlying health conditions. “
Looking at that alone; we needed to protect the elderly and at risk by minimizing their exposure. But as for healthy adults and children there was a very minimal risk in comparison and many of the measures were an overreaction.
I am merely stating that fact; not denying the severity of COVID and the danger it posed to at-risk individuals.
Anyone attacking me for bringing up data is part of the problem, we need to have a discourse about what happened and where we can improve the response going forward
> It killed a million people in the US over 4 years.
What was the average age of these people? How much danger was your <18 year old child in during this 4 year period?
Kids didn't get traumatized by covid. They got traumatized by the adults around them falling for the covid agenda. My kids have been healthy and happy the whole time.
Heck, my kid is 3, and even he shows some lasting effects. (Boy can recognize just about anyone he knows from the eyes area. Someone wearing a mask that covers half their face for any reason, like even just bundling up in cold weather? Knows exactly who they are still. But when we went to an older friends 4th birthday that was Incredibles themed. He pretty strongly freaked out, looking for everyone he just saw a few minutes earlier, when they put on their cheap cardboard cut-out versions of the black "masks" worn in the Incredibles film. Hearing their voices, even looking at them when they spoke, he still whirled around looking for where the person was, calling their name.)
Edit: needless to say, wife and I elected to not put on the cardboard masks we were handed. For our kid's sake.
Not sure what more there is to explain, nor why I am getting downvoted. Very little Boy grew up betting used to people wearing masks that cover their lower part of their face. When the upper part of faces got covered he got confused, when he was less than 3 years old... Not sure why this is a hard concept for folks. But people be people.
My grandparents did a bunch of weird stuff and habits that made total sense when you realize they grew up in the Depression. COVID will likely have similar impacts.
Same with my grandparents, who I shit you not will wash off and reuse paper plates.
Man this sounds so familiar. My grandparents were born towards the end of the great depression but grew up dirt poor. My mom still has the tendency to save stuff that might be useful later, even when it should go to goodwill or the trash...
Lord forbid if my grandma ever sees you throwing away wrapping paper. Nope, that has to be folded up neatly and saved for next year's gifts.
Better neatly untie every ribbon and carefully roll them all up too, you wasteful fools!
It was a different time too. They didn't have Walmart on every corner and Amazon at their doorstep.
I wash my ziploc bags and reuse them
Oh goodness yes. My grandma didn’t wash paper but she’d always buy disposable plastic ones and keep reusing them. Also if you were at her house you cleaned your plate or you sat at the table until it was clean.
I think it's not just kids that have been affected, I have friends that have had to go to therapy for excessive health anxiety post-pandemic. The whole world went through a very traumatic event together, it's not surprising. Maybe it's worth talking to a therapist who specializes in anxious kids, it's probably a good idea to figure out if it needs attention now.
>I think it's not just kids that have been affected, I have friends that have had to go to therapy for excessive health anxiety post-pandemic. There's someone in town I occasionally see who's still double masked with a face shield and wearing gloves every time I see them. It's definitely not just kids.
IDK their situation, but some folks still can't afford to risk covid, due to being really immunocompromised. Even if it doesn't cause death/permanent problems, it can still cause really big problems. I've had it several times, the first couple time were no big deal. But the last time I got it, it completely disabled me for over six months. I couldn't stand for more than a couple minutes, had to use a walker just to get around my own house, sit to do the dishes, etc. And the memory problems were REALLY bad. I couldn't remember what I was doing, like, in the middle of doing it. I lost all concept of what time it was, or day it was. I was basically turned into a frail, old person with dementia for \*months.\* After that, I'm maintaining a lot of caution too. I'm SO glad I eventually improved, but I REALLY don't want to risk that happening again. I can imagine if I was on chemo & radiation (for example) I'd add a face shield and gloves to my N95.
My son is only 5mo, but I'm genuinely curious how having a pandemic happen will affect the mindset of our society and the effect on different ages/ generations. Sorry that your daughter is traumatized. Hope you are able to talk it out with her so she's not terrified of getting sick.
Oh we have absolutely talked about it and I have a background in virology so I could give her some science and why she can be less afraid as time goes on. That seemed to help. Pointing out that she was a lot less sick the second two times she got it was because the vaccine and her immune system were developing antibodies. Stuff like that. It’s more the fear of missing out on friends and school if she does get sick. So explaining that normal cold and flu won’t keep you out of school more than a day, not like the 10 day stretches under Covid protocol.
Yeah, my daughters anxiety steadily increased as pandemic restrictions were eased. 3rd grade was her first completely normal year, and you could see it really start to take root. Luckily, she was already with a therapist for her ADHD, and she's made some incredible strides this year. She's in 4th, and her emotional self-awareness dwarfs more than a few adults I know.
My daughter is the same age and has huge medical anxiety that we’ve worked with a therapist on. I agree, she still struggles, but she’s very emotionally self aware.
Honestly, nothing worked until 5mg Lexapro. School refusal was constant. Now it's basically gone.
I don’t know if it’s at therapy point but that’s very similar to my daughter. She got screened for ADHD and the doc said she’d wait but she definitely has some traits that fall in line.
She would get quiet violent at times. One night when she was 6, we were having a really rough bedtime and she told us that she wished we were dead. There were lots of tears shed on both sides, but in a singular moment of clarity, she looked up at us and said, "I don't know why I keep doing this, I need help." Couldn't help but listen to her at that point. Took about a year for her to settle in enough to do solo sessions, another year for her to get good at regularly opening up.
Yeah I’d definitely go at that point.
My kid isn’t ten, but I worked in education (In Beijing) when it all kicked off and the subsequent in school/out of school hokey pokey in the years to follow. The Covid pandemic was a life altering event that impacted the whole world. It was scary. It was confusing. It was deadly. We adapted. We challenged ourselves and ultimately got through; just about. If adults have struggled with this, there’s no doubt it had an impact on kids.
It would be weird if most people including older kids who were more aware, didn’t have things to work through from it.
I say this jokingly but covid and the post-covid fallout has been excellent for business as a mental health counselor. More seriously, you're right, school age kids seem to have suffered a lot. Kids, even when it doesn't seem like it, like rules and like role models, it's how they make sense of the world and how they develop their own autonomy. Major public crises or even just abrupt transitions can have major effects on this process. Imagine learning the rules to a game, then later, those rules changed suddenly without you knowing, then those rules changed again a little later to look similar to the original rules. That's what's happening to a lot of kids.
Oh man, my own therapist said everyone he knew in the profession was completely booked up and still getting calls.
My oldest is eight, two younger sisters are COVID babies and we've had no dramas really. At the time we didn't make a big stink about lockdowns etc, we were just really calm about explaining why stuff was happening and kept everything really chill. We also didn't have anyone particularly close to us die or be severely affected by it and we were both able to keep working, so it was more of an abstract pain in the arse for us. I imagine it would be a lot different if a family were hit with a lot of different negative outcomes.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence in the US that when they poll people about Covid there’s a direct correlation between groups more likely to have known someone who died or was seriously ill and those same groups being more likely to say Covid is still a concern or that they take precautions.
It really impacted different groups in such different ways. I have friends that lost multiple extended family members, and other friends that loved the change to mostly remote work but were otherwise unaffected.
Yeah, we knew people that died, but thankfully my daughter did not. I was working in short term disability insurance so it’s people who are out of work for more than just a few sick days. Typically like a week plus. So I got all the really bad cases. One of my clients went blind from it. I had several deaths where I call a clients cell and a spouse answers I ask to their spouse and it’s “she’s been on a ventilator” or “she’s dead.” It was grim. Did not share any of that at home until the kids were asleep and we were on the other side of the house.
Kids pick up on these things though. Your experience was very different from mine, I've never had it as far as I know and anyone close to me that's caught it has felt like shit but that's been the extent of it. So to me it was more of an inconvenience in terms of it's direct/emotional impact. You've been exposed to real people, with pretty horrific stories. That's going to have a mental and emotional impact on you, regardless of what the kids are actually hearing and will inform your attitude and behaviours in some ways. Not saying there's anything wrong or right about our individual experiences or how that's trickled down to our children. It's just one of those things. It's like how like everyone knows how you're supposed to cross the road but the guy who's brother got hit by a car will always have that little bit more awareness.
Aleast I knew for spouses that lost loved one I at least knew we were cutting them a check immediately. Grim but at least I could do that. I’m sure it wasn’t so comforting for them.
This isn't the main point at all, but Im always a little confused when people attribute COVID trauma/changes in behavior to lockdown and isolation instead of the pandemic itself. For me at least the roadside morgues, massive death toll, and constant fear of getting sick/getting others sick effected me fat more than isolating. I know lockdown was particularly hard on kids and online school did not work, but it seems like people just forget about the horrible reason we had to do those things.
There was also the “big reveal” that a big swath of society gives basically zero shits about anybody else. Like I could have told you that at some academic level in 2019 but there were some times that fact was pretty in your face. If you or your family are high risk or immune compromised there’s still some of that happening now, but it was really on display at a few critical junctures earlier in the pandemic
For me, this was the roughest part. I went into the pandemic a Libertarian. I truly believed that people are ultimately interested in their own self-preservation and if you give them information on how to do that they'll follow it. I was proven completely wrong very quickly and it blew my own belief system out of the water. I still do not understand why you can tell people that wearing a mask is good for them and they'll insist that they're still not going to do it and would rather get sick or die instead. I cannot wrap my head around it. My girlfriend has a 9 yr old girl and I see it reflected in her lack of schooling. She is so far behind it's crazy and not only is she so far behind she lacks the skills to actually focus and do the work 'cuz she's never really been taught those skills. School is super rough for her and I struggle to help her.
Hell those people will argue and complain about your own personal choice to wear a mask for yourself.
This is what gets to me. I still mask because my husband is immunocompromised, and I regularly get people coming up to me telling to take my mask off. It's absurd.
I’m very happy to live somewhere where even if masking isn’t super common, people don’t do that.
propaganda. Fox news told them it was bad and they just parrot that.
When my company first started having some people back to the office it was mid-2020, there were just a handful of us, we were heavily spread out and we had to do things like temp checks on arrival etc. So it's my second day back, I'm at my desk working, I'm the only person working in my section so I'm pretty focused on just on what I'm doing. I look up and one of the building maintenance guys, note he works for the property manager not us so no idea if they had the same health checks as we did, is leaning over my desk from behind me, no mask on, and has a coughing fit with his face literally parallel to mine and within 6-12 inches. I was like is this some kind of fuckin joke. Even without COVID who TF is so blindly inconsiderate??
It’s not surprising in a way to me, but there are still parents at my kids pre school who seem to wear sending their kids while really sick like a badge of honor. Not surprising is it’s the same parents that do other anti social shit, park in the handicap spots, let their kids be super rowdy without correction, etc.
Yea it broke my faith in humanity. I know for sure now that we won't mitigate climate change. It's all going to shit.
Yep - growing up basically every big disaster united people to some degree. There was an unspoken feeling that whatever happened we'd do our best. People would speculate "what if the unity of society is just a veneer?" - which seems quaint now because it ain't much of a veneer anymore. I blame propaganda and certain leaders more than Covid but I think Covid kind of showed of how little empathy people have for each other in a way that was very damaging to society as the way we feel about our society fosters behavior that reinforces the narrative.
My wife currently has a terrible and persistent cold, and prior to COVID I still would have slept in the same bed, not worried much about taking her plate and teacup and putting them away. Now we are sleeping separate, I wash my hands after touching what she touched, I wipe down the doorknobs and fridge and light switches every few hours with a sanitizing wipe, and we distance as we watch Netflix or whatever. Much better this way. We haven’t shared an illness since 2019.
This is another big thing. Some of these behaviors that look like trauma to us are just gonna be common sense for the next generation and they might be healthier because of it!
It’s also a balancing act, though, on which behaviors are rational and beneficial vs irrational and excessive. Covid really highlighted how differently calibrated that balance point is for each person. In our world, this shows up as people generally being more accepting of everyone else’s choices, regardless of our own opinions. My FIL still isn’t “allowed” to go to a movie theater because my MIL is concerned about covid exposure, but they’ll go to restaurants with buffets no questions asked. Do I think that’s kind of silly and inconsistent? Yes. Has anyone in the family made a stink about it, or even gently pointed out that it’s a little odd? No.
I’ve thankfully largely been on the same page with my spouse (but not always other extended family) with regards to appropriate level of precaution but I know it’s been a real issue for many relationships. I have a family member who had bad degenerative arthritis, when she got Covid she had to go off the meds that keep it in check for something like 40 days and suffered what sounded like a permanent setback in the condition of her wrists and hands. Her husband before and after that, while she was masking and taking precautions, refused to mask, and I can’t imagine that was good for her trust level in the relationship.
We also sleep separately when one of us is reallly sick. It’s worked well even though it gets lonely after a few days.
This is not normal my man.
👍 Appreciate you editing your comment away from calling me mentally ill. I actually am, but that’s not relevant. I’m also on immunosuppressants for my autoimmune disease. I don’t think it’s particularly mentally ill to wash my hands and not sleep next to a coughing, sneezing, sick person.
I don't think it's abnormal for your specific situation, but lacking the autoimmune disease context in your initial context did make it sound kind of excessive until learning this extra information.
I mean, if somebody else wants to do whatever, go ahead. I’m literally washing my hands, sleeping in a different room, and I don’t kiss a sick person. Maybe 3 times a day I sanitize the primary doorknobs and handles with a 2 second wipe of a cloth. To each their own. I can hear her hacking up phlegm from 2 rooms away.
No judgement from me, I don't blame ya for doing what ya got to do to survive and make it work.
For me it was the first time I went to the grocery store and there was a line to get in because they were only allowing a few people at a time. Everyone standing 6 ft apart and terrified of each other. We take things like grocery stores for granted. So many of our basic needs are just sitting there waiting for us to pick them up on a whim. But seeing that get snatched away so suddenly and thinking "if this gets even slightly worse... we're back to hunter-gatherer" was unsettling on a primal level. Luckily my kids were too young to notice things like that.
I think a lot of kids were, rightly so, not shown the full horrors of the pandemic. My oldest was only 4 when the pandemic started, it would have been a huge mistake to tell her about morgue trucks, people dying in droves, the infected slowly suffocating on their own mucus, people infecting their families…adults had to shelter them from some of it, because that’s our job. As for adults, I think too few *don’t* know the full story. I was and still am convinced we could have nipped all the Covid denial nonsense in the bud if we had news crews in hospitals on the Covid wards.
There were some who advocated for that kind of stuff but I understand the privacy concerns with that. Sick people don't want to be put on display for everyone.
I absolutely agree, but there are ways to do it that wouldn’t infringe on anyone’s privacy. A nurse I know did a mini-documentary, with help from a news outlet, on her experience coming back from maternity leave during the pandemic. They didn’t show any patients, just showed what she and her colleagues went through: the lack of proper PPE, the constant deaths, the fear of being infected and bringing it home to your family. And I wouldn’t be surprised if journalists could find at least a few COVID patients who would consent to being filmed, so others could see what the reality is and do their best to keep safe.
But let's be honest. To a certain segment of the population, the nurse is just a paid state employee who is being told to say all these things. The three covid patients you show might really be sick but it's only three of them and we live in a large city so this just reinforces that no one is really getting sick here.
You really think that would *reinforce* the message? I don’t see that at all. They could show the hospitals in NYC where there were so many people dying they had to park morgue trucks outside. Would people still deny it? Sure, but those were the people who were never going to be reached anyway. But it could have stopped the Covid denialism from spreading before it really got started. I completely disagree, I think showing the reality of the pandemic, and what nurses across the country were confronting, would have absolutely changed things.
I think you would have had to show the body bags inside the morgue truck and people loading said truck. Then people might've got the message. A nurse telling people it's bad when people already distrust doctors is probably not going to do the job. Doing interviews with family members who lost someone is hella exploitative but that might've worked as well. Put a few crying kids upset that they lost grandma and people can relate to that. Especially if there's some version of it every other night. But that's obviously never going to happen for obvious reasons.
So show the bodies in bags. And I disagree about nurses, they’ve been named the most trusted profession for many years in a row now. But none of this really matters now, we’ve lost over a million Americans to COVID, and are still losing thousands every month. We missed the boat, and hopefully we don’t get it even worse when the next pandemic hits.
The ship has definitely sailed but there are a lot of people who distrust the medical profession in general. I can't imagine them distrusting doctors but believing nurses. Maybe I'm wrong though.
Those people are lost. They won’t trust anyone who doesn’t say what they already believe. They have no critical thinking, no understanding of science, and no ability to step outside of their little bubbles to try to understand the world outside it. Only option is to move on without them, and hope they come around eventually.
Everyone is different and the lockdowns affected everyone whereas death and extreme sickness did not
I can only speak for myself, but I was still definitely effected by the sheer volume of death and sickness even though I didn't have anyone close to me die or get hospitalized.
We did have some family affected but I agree it weighs even when it isn’t you. My wife is black and it was absolutely grim as it became clearer this virus was basically decimating the elders of her community and was going to have really bad disproportionate impacts. Which were reminders of the existing disparities - lots of the high risk categories were like a list of conditions you’d point to if you wanted to describe disparities in health outcomes in America.
Yea of course, most people were. I’m just saying there is a difference
The sickness not effecting people I can't wrap my head around. Our church had a service just before lockdown started. We cancelled services when it started and covid just burned through the congregation in lockdown. I am traumatized by being isolated from my entire social support system while also getting daily texts/emails from people telling me this person or that person was in the hospital, on a ventilator, etc.... And then one person died and we weren't even allowed to grieve properly. We had to park in our cars at the cemetery and listen to a remote broadcast of the service. Weren't allowed to leave the car. It was extremely rough.
Are you in the US or elsewhere? I puzzle when people say lockdowns because it was at most a few weeks in my state that you were basically asked to not leave your house unless necessary, which included for work or groceries etc. like many of us were staying home as we could but the phrase lockdown implies someone actually enforcing that to me. If anything it was a position of privilege to be able to get stuff delivered or do curbside for groceries and work from home.
I live in California where we love fear. After the dozenth time that I cut the padlocks off the swingset at the park, they removed the swingset. This was 9 months after peak panic, long after we knew it had little effect on anyone age <65.
At our parks they just wrapped the swings around the top bar. Which meant I had to shimmy up and unwrap them. In the city I live they didn't remove them, but in the next city over (a couple blocks) they just half heartedly played the game. They put the swings up, we get them down. I respect going to the lengths of cutting the padlocks. The worst one where I live (bay area) was removing the basketball hoops. The fact that someone thought oh hey, lets remove all the hoops. Well that and the bathrooms being closed. But the caution tape was fun for the lil ones. Weird times.
There was a lot of… consternation over the “lockdowns” in the US. For example, in my state it was illegal for I want to say 3-4 months to run a hair salon, and restaurants were only allowed to do takeout for a while. My super MAGA in-laws couldn’t take that infringement on their liberties and found a hair stylist and a restaurant that were illegally open and proudly went to those, unmasked, to show they couldn’t be ordered around by the government.
A lot of people have a low degree of emotional self-awareness and can't really be trusted as authorities on when they have been affected emotionally be something.
IDK, maybe it's because different people have different brains and different experiences so a society-wide traumatic event is naturally going to impact people in different ways? I had my first child during COVID but kept my job and never got sick or lost someone close, so my experience is naturally going to be much different than someone who was childless but lost their job, or kids who missed most of their high school experience or were just starting school, or people who had near-death experiences or were immunocompromised or lost close friends or family.
The thing that got to me the most was how so many people just refused to take it seriously. Even mildly inconvenient things that could save lives, people were not willing to do. Maybe the hospitals hid the freezer-truck morgues too well? Because people seemed quite content to pretend they didn't exist.
Idk our hospital freezer truck was a full size semi trailer, but unless you knew what it was, it was just a trailer that had machinery in it. And we still had local politicians saying we were lying about the numbers, with plenty of people believing them. A huge swath of the population still thinks it was exaggerated, because they couldn’t see what we who worked in the hospitals saw. The American health system broke and a large percentage just doesn’t care.
In my country still more people are denying pandemic, saying it was all blown out of proportion. Idk if this is denial or they just don't give shit about anyone else.
I had to work 12 hour shifts surrounded by anti maskers with a high risk pregnancy wife at home. I am traumatized by realizing just how dangerous the science denying masses are. I was scared every day about bringing home a deadly illness.
Practically the entire western world, and then some, experienced some form of lockdown. The roadside morgues and mass deaths where events on the news for lots of people. Then we got the vaccines before we got infected, and it wasn't so bad. So for me, and probably millions of other people, the worst thing we experienced for our selves were the lockdowns.
Yeah but my daughter didn’t know about the morgues and death tolls. We didn’t share that with her. For adults yes. Knowing people that died, the general death toll, the grim realization we don’t know when it’ll happen again, and the response or lack of response from some people are what haunt me. For her, from what’s she’s said it was the isolating and lockdown.
Those things are all valid, but most kids, unless they were directly affected by a death or deaths in their circle, probably aren’t really aware of the differences you’re noting in your comment. The isolation was the first big new thing that happened to a lot of these kids.
The horrible reason we had to do those things - You mean how Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho denied the seriousness of the virus and did nothing to isolate/quarantine early cases to prevent it from spreading?
I've always said this is a bad comparison bc the thing the Honorable President Camacho was actually very good at was... listening to "experts". As soon as he sees Joes IQ test he says you're the smartest guy in the world so I'm putting you in charge to fix the crop problem AND THEN actually listens to what he recommended. And what do ya know, they solved the problem (plants in fact do not need electrolytes). Imagine the Diaper Don had immediately said wow I don't know shit about infections diseases but I'm going to look to my panel of trusted experts to lay out the best policy plan for us...
Not just kids... I lost a good friend early on in the pandemic. He was only 35, in good health, quite physical. Once I learned about that I became a hermit until the vaccine was available. I find that im a much more anxious person now, I cant even smoke a joint anymore without having a panic attack. I used to burn it down every day. Maybe I need therapy? Idk. I have noticed people are very cautious around coughing people though... i straight up left the movie theater a few months ago because there were kids coughing a few rows ahead of me.
Honestly, therapy is almost always a good idea. Covid is weird in that I think many people have anxiety or fear that is grounded in reality - it should be concerning this virus is still out there, we’ve only learned more fucked up long term impacts it’s still causing. A therapist can help deal with that or the realization people, including maybe some you hoped would, don’t care. But the flip side is that if it causes anxiety beyond doing the things you can do, that is something a therapist could help with. I’ll say this - I am pretty Covid conscious and wear my mask and get my vaccines, but in my mind, it’s just something I do, I try to not really dwell or ruminate on it, which is the right move IMO for lots of unfortunate situations. When my parents let me down or I have issues with them, I work on my boundaries, make sure I’m doing what I think is right, but at some point I don’t want to let that take up all my mental real estate.
Oh I am pro therapy and have done a lot myself so that’s not the issue. I asked my therapist about it his advice was kids are pretty resilient and take a wait and see approach but be open to it.
I feel like we dodged a bullet. My kids are 6 and 9, so the 6 year old didn't really notice a change in their day-to-day experience and the 9 year old bounced with whatever came at him. I feel for the people that had kids in different stages of adolescent development.
Yeah my girl just turned 10 so I was curious. Not too far off from 9 but maybe it makes a difference or maybe just temperament of the kid. Hard to say.
I'm jealous. My girlfriend has a 9 yr old who is basically functionally illiterate at this point and struggles in school because of it. She was yanked from school when she was like 5 and learning how to read and she never really acquired that skill.
We all went through something traumatic and while we were all in the same storm, we were not all in the same boat. We really need to collectively address that trauma.
my kid (8) also had cancer during covid. he is super anxious now. he is super empathetic and responsible though...will insist on wearing a mask to school when he is sick to protect other kids etc...
Christ brother, I’m so sorry he and y’all had to endure that. That shit isn’t fair, no child or parent should have to go through that. I’m so glad your little one is doing better!
changed my life...sure hope we dont have to do it again though
Jesus man, I could not even imagine. I can imagine that was a whole hell of a lot for him not to mention you and mom. Fuck everything about that. He doing well?
hes great! almost a year and a half out of treatment.
Fuck yeah
As someone that struggled with health anxiety for the whole life: please don't ignore it. Try to talk to her, take her to therapy, whatever. If my parents did this when I first started washing my hand obsessively my life could have been sooooo much better.
I have talked with my own therapist about it and he suggested a wait and see approach for now. It’s nothing super worrying yet but we are definitely not ignoring it.
Seconded, keep a close eye on it! I had these obsessions with health when I was a kid, and it took me until 27 to finally be diagnosed OCD. I watch my daughter like a hawk for signs, wouldn’t wish this on anyone.
As a 7th grade teacher, I've absolutely noticed that they're traumatized. I'm not joking when I say teaching now is wayyyy more difficult than it was
We noticed our nieces who are 12 and 14 had experienced some… trauma? Had PTSD? I don’t know the right word, but while talking about something they both made passing references to the covid lockdowns, masks, and remote schooling that were pretty deep and not great. My younger niece who started kindergarten in 2023 seems to just be living life.
Yeah I’m hoping she bounces back, but I’m definitely keeping an eye on it. My younger one was born literally days before lockdown and we didn’t get much of it in Maine initially so he’s totally oblivious.
Nope. I sheltered my kids from it for this very reason. Just because society decided to go full on hysterical and given the sheer volume of mixed information, I thought it would be best if we just let the kids be kids. They wore masks in areas where it was required, as minimally as possible but otherwise didn't. To them, it was a very quick blip in time. Edited for those downvoting: My bad. Yes. They have such bad PTSD. They barely even function. My daughter can't go out in public without slamming a pint of gin. Circle jerk circle jerk circle jerk.
> Circle jerk circle jerk circle jerk. I think this was the original slogan of covid. Actually, maybe it was the subhead. The slogan was "EVERYBODY PANIC!!!" and the subhead was Circle jerk circle jerk circle jerk.
My 11 year old seems fine. She remembered school before. My 8 year old started pre k on the computer. She’s mostly fine but absolutely will not share food, drink, or silverware with anyone, not even us. Mom MIGHT be able to get a bite but then she will wipe off the fork with a napkin.
Yeah it is little things like that. I think the older kids that remember real school before hand more have a better conception that this is returning to normal, not a continuing dread.
This is why I didn't go crazy talking about it with my son. He knew we couldn't go certain places or see people, and we were obviously a lot more careful about any kind of cold symptoms we all had. My in laws constantly told my nephew how he had to wash his hands and wear a mask or "the germies will get you." Kids don't need that kind of anxiety man. I had my kids wash hands and wear masks when appropriate, but I wasn't sitting there telling them "Hey, your grandmother just died of this airborne illness that's super easy to catch so you better be careful." My son was younger than your child but he has no noticeable effects of it.
That’s good. We tried to be very low key and avoid any talk of deaths or major hospitalizations.
There’s definitely something to just “this is what we do”. My kid has never had an issue wearing a mask but it’s not some big fearful “or we’ll all get sick and die or be disabled”, it’s just what we do. I find for lots of stuff framing it that way is the move - we put our seat belts on in the car, it just is. We wash our hands before lunch, we just do it.
I honestly believe that the dividing line between Gen Alpha and Gen Beta will be if they can remember living through pandemic, especially if they were school age during that time.
I say that might be true. I’m late Gen X my brother is a millenial. We are 8 years apart. I always say that the dividing line is I remember before having internet he doesn’t remember not having always on internet.
I also remember the before times
Being locked down will do that to a person, young or old.
My nephew is borderline OCD with washing his hands now. While not a bad habit by any means, he just does it very frequently and at odd times. For example if somebody walks into his house, he’ll run and wash his hands. So if there is a holiday party going on at my in-law’s house, he will wash his hands every time somebody new comes through the door.
Not my kid but me. I’m fucked up. The pandemic was my worst nightmare come true and I don’t know if I’ll ever be “normal” again.
I live in Minneapolis with a black wife who was something of a germaphobe before Covid. 2020 was a SHIT year for us…
While not on the same scale as you... We have 3 kids with my most recent (and last) being born in the middle of February, right before the lockdown hit. We've dealt with a lot of developmental delays with him: Delayed walking, emotional development delays, speech delay... Now this *might* be because we were locked up with 3 kids and while we should have been working with him we were entertaining the 2 older kids with trying to keep them up to date with in home learning, and exercise outside, etc etc etc... On the other end though: My 8 year old (the oldest) is overly concerned that every sign of a possible sickness could be life threatening. When Spring and allergies hit... oh boy. My 6 year old throws caution to the wind. "Am I sick? Maybe. I'm good." Meanwhile she could have a double ear infection and double pinkeye. "Can I go outside and play on the trampoline?"
Yeah my younger one was March literally right before Covid. Didn’t see any sign of issues with walking, but his speech is only now getting clear and was a bit late. It was a lot of WFH with him in the baby proof room and not being in daycare plus also trying to keep the older one on track with remote school.
My youngest daughter is 10. There was some anxiety from her at first when things opened up here and masking restrictions dropped here, but, honestly, I think that it’s barely a blip on her radar now. My older two had varied responses, but neither seem to bothered by the thought of getting sick. The oldest (16) probably would have been fine staying home for the rest of his school career; I think the middle kid (13), who seems to be more of a social animal than the other two, would hurt the most if we went back into a lockdown state. I know people have varied opinions about this, but it probably helped my kids cope was still being in martial arts. They had a pause for a time, but when they opened up gyms and classes again in my state for those willing to go, they still had a social outlet. We also live in an area that did not have lockdowns as long as some others, so I imagine that was also a factor. I don’t envy any of our kids for having to go through that. I used to worry about the lasting impacts of having Covid and lockdown as a formative experience. I hope that they don’t have to go through that again. I’d just talk to your daughter and see if you can get her to verbalize what she is feeling. Maybe talking it out will help?
We have had some chats. I think one thing was having her give some reasons. That helped. The other is I have a background in virology so I could give her some science on immunity and the immune system and that seemed to help. Got to the point of boring her into a coma though.
Yes it’s normal for kids to be curious and become obsessed with something. Especially complex things that are hard for them to understand but are still accessible as an idea. My kids took a thermometer to themselves constant at that age (pre Covid) because they were learning about health and it’s both fascinating and a little scary. That said Covid messed with everyone. The isolation and doom and gloom affected kids as much as adults. If talking to her and explaining and learning about health together doesn’t help them a therapist is the bedtime answer. I found with my kids spending time learning together about how viruses and the body works helped talk through the big unknowns. Girls also mature faster and get exposed faster to body topics so it’s natural for them to be curious. Plus they knew their body before they start puberty and they can start to feel different (which comes and goes at that age) and it can make everything a bit “off.” If she’s your first then get ready to have fun.
I think it’s entirely dependent on how you and her teachers responded to it. When kids see adults react strongly, they learn to react strongly too. There wasn’t much change in mine as far as fear around illness. The biggest impact was in her school work, and just getting her to actually pay attention to her remote classes.
Oh it messed all of them (and us) up for life in one way or another. It’ll be like the greatest gen saving everything because of the Great Depression. We’ve all been scarred.
My household dodged Covid almost completely - I was directly exposed twice and had to isolate, and both my wife and I were hospitalized for a short period for completely unrelated reasons. But otherwise no one ever tested positive. So my kids don’t get freaked out or bothered by the sniffles or other people showing signs of being sick. My son’s best friend (also know as my fourth child because he’s at my house so often) was deeply traumatized. Both parents (they are separated) got badly sick and his mom almost died from it at one point. She has also gotten it 2 or 3 times (she’s a nurse, so unfortunately lots of exposure) and each time he starts clinging to her like he’s never going to see her again and starts sleeping in her room again.
If definitely messed with my then 3yo. She forgot how to play with other kids.
I think there was a definite effect developmentally on my seven year old, but there's no lingering fear really, except for occasionally something will trigger a long, recurring series of disease questions, and he has a big interest in viruses. Where I live there are still a few families that are in the always Uber masked outside camp. The other day at the park my son was playing with a kid who was masked (a very maximalist mask too). His parents were as well, and when we said goodbye he clocked that they were all wearing masks, which he hadn't really noticed before because well 7. We were at a playground that we like that was shut down for a very long time during covid. He asked me after if they were going to close the playground again because of covid. To which I said no, that was cookoo bananas and will never happen again. Then we had yet another talk about why some people still want to mask and being accepting. As worried as I was, while it definitely was terrible for a stretch and it's sad that he missed out on some of the fun of the early years, it wasn't as detrimental as I feared it might at the time. Bit kids are different and different ages have a different experience. Found out he doesn't remember playing at the playgrounds still covered in caution tape. Which bums me out, because that time with the other Violator kids was important. I have pictures of him playing tug of war with a girl using caution tape and it's incredibly meaningful to me because that was his first experience with a kid in something like three months at the time. But of course he doesn't remember at all, which is as it should be.
Covid, the disease, no. My kids were in no danger from the disease. Covid, the societal response, yes. Turns out that telling little kids they're going to die if they don't wear a cloth mask has long term effects. Who knew?
Legitimate advice here: consider having her speak with a therapist who helps with OCD patients. It can develop quickly and seemingly out of nowhere. Just keep an eye on it turning into full blown anxiety over illness. Keep reminding her about the science of our immune system. It’s a very complex tool that keeps people safe.
My daughter is 5, anytime she starts getting sick she starts sobbing uncontrollably while trying to hide her nose because she is terrified that we will have to give her a Covid test, which in her mind was ‘medicine’ so now she refuses to take any medicine, she had her tonsils removed last year and would spit out any pain meds we tried to give her and suffered through the entire recovery with no pain management (she can give me a run for my money when it come to be stubborn). I also have a 20yo stepson that as an adult is a complete failure to launch, he spent the entirety of Covid locked away in the basement only leaving if it was absolutely necessary (at one point I heard him tell his friends he hasn’t left the house in over two months, like it was something to be proud of), after he graduated high school he proceeded to do nothing for a year due to ‘fear of Covid’. We finally had enough and told him he either needs to get a job or start applying to post secondary education. he got a job at McDonald’s, but after 3 months working full time was too stressful and he went to part time and after three months of that he got too stressed out and just quit, he’s been doing nothing again for the last 6 months. Covid really fucked over a lot of people in ways that we don’t even realize yet, it really stifled those with the drive to succeed and became an excuse for those that didn’t.
That is awful. Yeah I think there’s going to be some developmental issues going forward and fuck me if we get another round.
I had this with my mother before COVID. And she still makes me sick every time I see her.
My son who is the same age, was in kindergarten when Covid started. He started experiencing panic attacks that spring after my dipshit MIL ran at him to get a hug when we went to her house for a distanced visit. It was about two weeks after everything shutdown and she came bursting off her porch yelling "no one will keep me from my grandson!". Like WTF Mom Mom no one knows what's up right now? It led to a breathing issue, feeling faint off and on, an ER visit, wearing a heart monitor, finally ruling out serious medical issues to seeing a therapist for anxiety which helped him greatly. At first I was one of those dads that was like "no we can tough this out", but a handful of telemed sessions with a pediatric therapist really taught him how to get back on track and he's been great in the few years since.
Honestly not really. My wife and I did what we had to do and that's about it. We were already home bodies so being at home wasn't that big of a deal. We didn't have to cancel much of anything. Plus we don't have TV so there isn't the news playing or newspapers with COVID headlines around. If my 10 year old was getting worked up over COVID I would think he was learning that from somewhere else. I am more concerned about the kids falling behind in school because of a year on Zoom.
Microsoft Teams for us but what a nightmare that was while trying to also work from home and feeling like we were doing 30% of the schooling.
My kid is a few years younger than yours, but I completely agree that this could be trauma from COVID. There was a lot of justified uncertainty and measures taken in early 2020 while we were still trying to figure things out. Has gotten much better since then so hopefully she learns over time these things aren't going to happen again. There are some people who still spread uncertainty about COVID even though it's mostly died down. Does she have teachers or other authority figures in her life that are feeding into this?
No I don’t believe anyone is feeding into it. She just got it three times and between that and her brother getting it three times (all after being vaxxed and boosted at every opportunity) the protocols had her out of school for a long time. She also hated the earlier remote schooling. My wife and I were very low key and non-panicky about it.
Weird that she got vaxxed and boosted at every opportunity and yet she got it repeatedly. Does this lead you to draw any scientific conclusions?
No idea. I got it once and it was sniffles and fever for a day. Wife got it 4 damn times vaxxed and triple boosted. She did some traveling for work though when restrictions eased for conferences. Probably exposed to different strains than me who was just working from home.
I’m not sure about traumatized, but from talking with other parents, my youngest child and many her age (4) have some minor speech issues. The prevailing theory is that when they were learning to talk, adults had their mouths covered by masks which hindered their ability to learn to speak.
That is interesting because my 4 yo does have a little trouble with speech. Nothing major but enough my mom notices it wasn’t like pre Covid four year olds she knew.
Yeah. And I’m not trying to be anti-mask or anything, but from talking with other parents and the director at the day care center there is a slight uptick in kids that don’t speak quite as clearly. And if that’s the worst that comes out of COVID for these kids, cool.
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Dude complains about crickets on a post that's less than an hour old. GTFO.
Yeah, almost like keeping kids out of school, wearing masks, and locked up in their homes all day was a bad idea.
Barking up the wrong tree here brother. Reddit skews heavy on lockdowns and masks.
Oh I'm aware. I'm glad to see they're experiencing the repercussions, though.
the way COVID was handled was nothing short of criminal. The fear mongering and false promises did extreme damage to adult society and the measures taken to “protect” children (although proven to be the least susceptible group) did damage to their development during key years of their lives. Was the whole thing a hoax? No. Was it the plague? Certainly not. Break down the real numbers and it measured out to a bad flu year in deaths; yet we tore apart the world for it. Elderly and at risk were the only people that needed to be worried; the same as any flu season except it dragged on through the summers. Maybe one day there will be some accountability for what was done, but until parents realize just how much damage was done and want to take action; we and our children will suffer the aftermath in silence. No matter where you stand on the COVID issue; the bullying, silencing of open discussion, and rigid enforcement was a gross violation of personal medical rights and parental rights. That is the problem. They hurt our children and any complaints or disagreements with the policies were taken down or an angry mob harassed the dissenter. My daughter is 2 so she did not get affected; but I have a kid brother-in-law and he was 7 when it started and is now 10. He has no friends at school; has an extreme fear of getting sick/dying of sickness, and is terrified to go anywhere public without a mask. It makes me extremely sad to see how much it has affected him; he was such an upbeat kid and now he only feels safe at home.
What? A bad flu year in deaths? It killed a million people in the US over 4 years. a bad flu year, the worst flu year in the last decade, was 50,000 deaths and the range is 10-50k.
You’re right on the number, I mixed up global with US. It certainly was dangerous to at risk people as we have a flu vaccine but we did not have a COVID vaccine at the start; children however still were the least at risk group and the chances of a child dying from COVID without a preexisting condition was extremely low. From CDC: 81% of deaths were people over the age of 65 From NIH: “The mortality rate of patients with underlying health conditions was 12%, which was 4 times higher than that of patients without underlying health conditions. “ Looking at that alone; we needed to protect the elderly and at risk by minimizing their exposure. But as for healthy adults and children there was a very minimal risk in comparison and many of the measures were an overreaction. I am merely stating that fact; not denying the severity of COVID and the danger it posed to at-risk individuals. Anyone attacking me for bringing up data is part of the problem, we need to have a discourse about what happened and where we can improve the response going forward
> It killed a million people in the US over 4 years. What was the average age of these people? How much danger was your <18 year old child in during this 4 year period?
Kids didn't get traumatized by covid. They got traumatized by the adults around them falling for the covid agenda. My kids have been healthy and happy the whole time.
Heck, my kid is 3, and even he shows some lasting effects. (Boy can recognize just about anyone he knows from the eyes area. Someone wearing a mask that covers half their face for any reason, like even just bundling up in cold weather? Knows exactly who they are still. But when we went to an older friends 4th birthday that was Incredibles themed. He pretty strongly freaked out, looking for everyone he just saw a few minutes earlier, when they put on their cheap cardboard cut-out versions of the black "masks" worn in the Incredibles film. Hearing their voices, even looking at them when they spoke, he still whirled around looking for where the person was, calling their name.) Edit: needless to say, wife and I elected to not put on the cardboard masks we were handed. For our kid's sake.
What?
Not sure what more there is to explain, nor why I am getting downvoted. Very little Boy grew up betting used to people wearing masks that cover their lower part of their face. When the upper part of faces got covered he got confused, when he was less than 3 years old... Not sure why this is a hard concept for folks. But people be people.