Jonny McCambridge: Just what is lockdown doing to our children?

On a mild June evening almost six years ago he unexpectedly suffered a prolonged febrile convulsion, a seizure caused by a rapid rise in body temperature in infants.

I was on my way home from work when the fit occurred and was redirected to the hospital. I arrived to a distressing scene, akin to something from a television medical drama. My son, his features covered by an oxygen mask, was on a bed, his tiny body convulsed in uncontrollable spasms. A team of doctors and nurses surrounded him.

The seizure lasted for an agonising half hour before it passed and the medics informed us that he was out of danger.

Later, when he was recovering on the ward, I spoke to one of the doctors. Cognisant of the trauma suffered, I asked this man if there were likely to be any long-term effects. He looked at me evenly and said he did not know, and that we may never know.

Since then my boy has developed into a happy and healthy child, as impish as any youth. He is the perfect realisation of everything that I have ever wanted to achieve in life.

But still, I am occasionally reminded of the doctor’s words to me on that day. All of the experiences we have, even those we don’t remember, shape us in some way, nudge us in one direction rather than the other. Perhaps if my boy had not endured that adversity he would be slightly different, a little more more confident. Or a little less.

The tenacity of the lockdown of recent weeks has ensured that what once felt novel has become humdrum. Like others, my family has been at home throughout. At lunchtime the routine has become set that I take my son outside for some exercise.

He likes to ride on his scooter, but the footpaths outside our house are rough and not suited to the little wheels of the toy. So we take a short walk to the top of the road where the surface is smoother and the gradient steep.

As we walk to this preferred spot we often pass other pedestrians. For a few weeks I was constantly having to remind my son about social distancing, how we have to step away to ensure that others, and us, are kept safe.

But I don’t have to do that anymore. Now, when my son sees other people coming, he instinctively moves aside. Yet it is more definite than this. I notice him grasping my hand more firmly and can sense a tightening in his core when others come close, as if he has been invaded by fear. Essentially he has absorbed the lesson that people carry disease and need to be avoided.

This is at once reassuring and disconcerting. The primary focus is to do whatever is necessary to ensure my son is safe during the pandemic. The secondary concern is what lockdown is doing to him; how it is changing him, impacting on his development. It was hard to teach him that he had to stay away from people. How much harder will it be to unpick that stitch and convince him, when it ends, that he can once again embrace those around him?

I suppose I have always viewed parenting as a broadly linear process, starting with a blubbering ball of rage and unreason which is eventually shaped into a young man who can find his own way. There are many bumps and twists in that passage but the general progression is set.

What I had not expected was the massive societal and personal shock of pandemic. There could be no preparation for the fact that education would be curtailed, that my boy would have to endure months without playing with another child, that his carefully nurtured routine would be shredded, that the necessity of my work would enforce solitude upon him, that isolation would remove him from his extended family, that he would shrink from contact with other people, that I would have to try to find a measured way to explain a global contagion to a six-year-old.

The parenting journey has for me been dominated down the years by fear - more specifically how to control and circumvent it. How to take a nervous infant and persuade him not to be afraid of trying new things, of meeting new people, of going to new places. Now the lockdown has turned that on its head. It has, to an extent, institutionalised fear.

I see it in my son. There are signs of regression evident on occasions when he finds it difficult to leave his mother’s side. Recently he woke in the night and told us that he had experienced a bad dream where his mum and I had abandoned him to fend for himself. I know of parents whose children are afraid to leave home.

Yet we stick with the restrictions because the fear is preferable to the pestilence. That is how it has to be.

Even as we crawl towards the easing of lockdown, it is done with the knowledge that we will be living with some form of social isolation for a long time. Perhaps long enough that the very youngest will not remember much of the the world which preceded it. At some point research will be devoted to the psychological impact of the lockdown on all of us, and particularly on our children. Psychiatrists have already warned of a tsunami of mental illness to come and the challenge for the health service, and for parents, in facing up to this will be daunting.

Next week, six years on from our trip to the hospital, will be my son’s seventh birthday. In normal times this would be a celebration involving wider family and friends. This year it will be just the three of us at home. My wife and I will devote every drop of our energy into somehow making it an event that is forever branded on his memory as a special day among many difficult ones.

As I said earlier, all of the experiences our children go through shape them. Many of these experiences I cannot control. Which makes it all the more important for me to give all I have to those that I can.

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