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For those rolling their eyes at the suggestion of further lockdowns, please don’t. It wasn’t that long ago since you and your loved ones were essentially locked in your homes, and treated like criminals if you dared leave them. It happened before, and it could happen again. And if it does, the effects will be devastating, particularly for younger individuals.
A recent study, carried out by academics in the UK, shows the devastating impact lockdowns had on university students. The study, comprehensive in nature, found that the pandemic and its accompanying mandates “caused a significant, negative impact on the well-being of British university students,” with many “suffering from prolonged and high levels of psychological distress and anxiety.”
Compared to pre-pandemic levels, students reported “markedly” lower levels of well-being and life satisfaction.
The findings of the study should come as no surprise. A massive part of higher education involves navigating the complexities of college life — budgeting, making new friends, attending lectures, and, of course, enjoying the nightlife. During lockdown, students in the UK and beyond, including Ireland, were deprived of these life-shaping opportunities. Sure, you can take a lecture online, but you can’t experience college life online. For many, attending college is a defining moment in their lives. It is an important chapter, one of the most important chapters, in their entire existence. During lockdowns, this chapter went unwritten. For many, it will forever remain unwritten. This has had profound psychological impacts, and, to a large extent, affected people’s career trajectories.
Lockdowns may be over, but their effects will be forever felt — in the lives of the young, the old, and everyone in between.
But especially the young.
In a media release, Dr. Chathurika Kannangara, the study’s co-author and a professor of psychology at the University of Bolton’s said that lockdowns saw students “cut off from friends and close family, and unable to rely on their usual routes for seeking physical or emotional support.” “In addition,” she added, “common entertainment and socialization facilities such as restaurants, bars, and clubs were closed for long periods – completely stripping away the normal social aspect of university life.”
Of course, university students – in the UK, Ireland and beyond – weren’t the only ones affected by draconian lockdown measures. In truth, everyone (except, perhaps, high-ranking officials) had their lives upended. Some, though, were hit harder than others.
Take young children, for example.
Aristotle famously said, “give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.”
The first 5-7 years of a child’s life are critical for development. They lay the foundation for one’s future existence. During the pandemic, as you no doubt recall, masks were mandatory. These glorified rags would, we were assured, prevent us from getting sick, and prevent the sick from infecting others. We now know that none of this was true. As Dr. Mark Ng, an infectious disease specialist at Singhealth Polyclinics in Singapore, told the mask-friendly BBC, masks do very little, if anything, to reduce transmission. Instead, he said, protective factors like “personal hand hygiene, safe distancing, and whether an area is well-ventilated” are considerably more important points to take into consideration. Although the efficacy of masks in protecting us from harmful pathogens is up for debate, what’s not up for debate is the effect that masks had and still have on the ways in which we interpret other people’s emotions and expressions.
Which brings us back to young children. With brain development, a child undergoes critical periods, or special time windows. In fact, up until the age of 5, a child’s brain develops more than at any other time throughout their life. During such periods, a young child’s nervous system is especially sensitive to certain stimuli, such as a father’s touch or a mother’s calming voice. Before mastering the art of effective communication, a child learns to recognize basic emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, etc. They learn how to decode complex expressions. This is a difficult process, but when masks enter the equation, it becomes almost impossible. In the aforementioned BBC article, Dr. Kang Lee, a developmental specialist, warned that masks appear to hinder a child’s ability to interpret emotions. That’s because facial visibility “is a key part of such development and masking can hinder that process,” as we “learn emotions mostly through the face.”
In 2021, a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology studied the effects of masks on the social and emotional development of toddlers. The authors clearly showed that the capacity to “read emotions from facial configurations when a face mask is present” becomes dramatically reduced in toddlers.” Privation of facial visual features, they stressed, “might alter or delay the development of social skills associated with face perception in early childhood.” Such warnings should not be ignored.
They are called critical periods for a reason. The damage done in childhood may very well be irreparable. As winter approaches and talks of further lockdowns inevitably begin to circulate, we must never forget the damage done. We mustn’t let those in power distract us from the rather brutal truth. We are social animals, designed to communicate and collaborate. Lockdowns, masks, and prolonged bouts of social isolation destroy lives.
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