Sometimes I think that it would really help my mood and mental health if I could avoid all media articles along the lines of “Here are all the terrible setbacks that children are suffering as a result of the pandemic, now let’s panic and freak out!”.

Unfortunately, as someone who works in education and has two kids under 2.5, that isn’t always possible. And the latest iteration of this has stung me into wanting to respond. This article appeared in The Guardian on Monday (04/04/2022): Empathy isn’t there: The pandemic effects on children’s social skills.

This is an article “told to” the journalist by “Jemma”, who is a nursery school teacher in West Sussex. Jemma freely unloads on all the shortcomings she perceives in children who (if they are entering nursery for the first time this school year) have likely spent the majority of their lives under lockdown. I think it’s quite sensationalised, and also a very good example of the kind of catastrophising I’m alluding to above.

Opening disclaimer: Yes, I am defensive as hell about pandemic parenting, and the fact that many of us have been through some really difficult and stressful experiences over the past two years. I don’t want to detract in any way from the fact that early years teachers and nursery staff have been through all sorts of challenges too, or that their difficulties are likely to be ongoing throughout the next few years.

That said, here are some of my responses to Jemma’s thoughts:

If children have siblings and they’ve mixed with others, they tend to be on the same level socially as before the pandemic. But the ones who are only children and have just been in the household with mum and dad don’t know how to interact.

At the risk of sounding like I’m missing something… yes, and? In other news, water wet, sky blue, people who have had little experience with a setting or situation haven’t learned the rules for interacting in it yet?

They have issues with sharing, being very overexcited and turn-taking. They’re quite advanced in numbers and letters for their age because they’ve been at home with adults, or they’ve been playing a lot on tablets, but they are very behind socially, the empathy isn’t there.

Being unaccustomed to sharing/taking turns with a large group of peers and “being very excited” (about attending what is presumably still a very new setting for these kids) is NOT the same thing as lacking in empathy, and it’s unnecessarily alarmist to state that it is.

If Jemma, or you, or I, were to be dropped down in a completely unfamiliar social setting — let’s say, a 16th-century Japanese tea ceremony, or a 17th-century European court masque, or a drag ball in 1980s New York — there is every likelihood that we would not know the right ritualised responses and behaviours, would make total arses of ourselves, and would quite likely even end up offending or hurting someone. People in that setting would probably think we were semi-feral unsocialised oafs if we were lucky. But would that make us “lacking in empathy”?

In many ways, a nursery school classroom is an equally ritualised space — how can a kid who’s never been in a group of more than two or three other children before possibly fathom what “line up nicely” or “circle time” might mean? While I understand that children have now had since September to internalise these lessons (I’m writing at the beginning of April), it seems very perverse to me to claim surprise that they are being slower than previous cohorts to do so, let alone to argue that this slowness says something about them as human beings.

If Jemma were reporting a gang of pandemic toddlers going around deliberately hurting one another, perpetuating petty cruelty to animals or setting small fires (which is what the heading of the article makes it sound a bit like!), I might be prepared to accept that there’s a problem here. But not sharing toys and getting over-excited? That sounds like normal little-kid behaviour that’s been a bit exacerbated by lack of experience with large groups of other children, not a generation of empathy-less mini-serial killers!

It’s not a criticism of the parents because they were forced into that situation, but you can see it in the children’s social skills. Under five, social skills are everything, it’s the marker of how they will develop more than whether they can say the alphabet or count to 10. Children with good social skills and interaction, even if they’re not the quickest at learning to read or write, often have the best educational outcomes.

The link between social skills and academic attainment here is a funny one. While yes, there is a known correlation between the development of self-regulation skills and academic performance, I went to Oxford and hoo boy, I could tell you some stories about a parade of seriously brilliant and high-achieving people for whom “social skills are everything” was definitely not the case. (Full disclosure: I strongly suspect I might be the subject of some other people’s stories, too!).

Additionally, if the children who are suffering from slower social development are “quite advanced in numbers and letters” as Jemma claims in the previous quote, could we not put our energy into advocating to retool the Early Years curriculum to spend more time on the areas in which they’re showing deficits rather than catastrophising about empathy-less children? I suppose “We need to rewrite our lesson plans: The pandemic’s effect on EYFS curriculum design” wouldn’t be as attention-grabbing a headline, but it might be a more constructive way to approach the problem.

Also, I don’t know about you, but personally I tend to find that anything that phrases itself as “not a criticism of the _____” is usually exactly the opposite — it’s one step up from using “no judgement” as a quick preface to an extreme attack of Judgey McJudgefacing in my experience. The non-criticism here definitely still seems to convey that those parents who have worked from home with their kids are in the wrong, especially as elsewhere the article points a specific finger at “slightly more middle-class children [who are] more likely to be only children, have older parents, and their parents are mostly office workers…. A lot of children were put on tablets.” I’d really like to see concrete evidence for this group as being more or less disadvantaged than others, as most of the other preliminary research I’ve seen so far has pointed in the opposite direction (ie. that developmental delays in the pandemic have been correlated with socioeconomic disadvantage).

The parents are definitely making it worse for their children socially and for themselves. We’ve got one particular little boy, he’s four and he’s not ever mixed with children at all. The mum is extremely nervous about Covid and so over-anxious that as soon as he cries, she’ll keep him off because she thinks he’s been traumatised. He’s a completely normal boy but he’s not being given a chance because her anxiety is transferring on to him.

More not-at-all-criticism of the kids’ parents here, I see 🙂 Actually, Jemma and I are kind of on the same page with this anecdote — if what she describes is accurate, it does sound as though a combination of circumstances have set this kid up for having some very bad experiences with nursery school, and that sucks.

In an ideal world, the nursery school staff would work with this parent to try to improve her son’s experiences and alleviate her anxiety as much as possible. She sounds like she might have had some traumatic experiences during the pandemic, and is probably having a horrible time right now if she believes that sending her child to nursery is traumatising him, whether that belief is accurate or not. Unfortunately we live in the world where instead of that work happening, the nursery school staff member turns around and publishes her complaints about the poor woman in a national newspaper.

“Empathy isn’t there” in Jemma’s classroom, but I’m not convinced that the kids are the ones who are missing it.