Beware the Lockdown Generation
19th March 2025
Here and there you can still see evidence of the collective madness of the Covid era. Some “social distancing” markers still linger on pavements or shop floors. Occasionally I find a face mask in a coat or handbag I haven’t used for a while. There was a feeble official “day of reflection” recently. But for at least some of us, life is sort of back to the way it was: four in ten workplaces are back in the office full-time, dog walkers are no longer hunted by drones, and the shops and churches are open. We mostly don’t talk about the Scotch egg thing, or being forced to say goodbye to dying loved ones by videolink.
But the kids are not alright. Back in 2020, we had no idea what the impact of lockdown would be on those young people whose normal development was so casually interrupted. And while every parent has a lockdown horror story, it was the most vulnerable children who were worst afflicted. Lockdown widened the school attainment gap, delayed children’s development, and plunged a generation of tweens and teens into psychiatric turmoil. But it didn’t just harm children; it also formed them. Especially for those who came of age concurrently with lockdown, the sheer strangeness of that period was itself a worldview-shaping experience — in ways we’ve scarcely begun to grasp.