once upon a pandemic
Until the spring of 2020, Rebecca Handford’s then two-year-old daughter Eadie was happily spending three days a week being looked after by her grandparents, enjoying trips out, and going to cafes. But then came the first lockdown, and her world closed in overnight. The family, who live in a small village on the border between Cheshire and Derbyshire in northern England, felt lucky to have a garden for Eadie to play in – although, as Handford ruefully puts it, while she was trying to work from home, “Mr Tumble did a lot of the heavy lifting”.
Eadie is an only child, and her language came on in leaps and bounds due to spending so much time with her parents. But Handford worries that she missed out on learning to socialise. “If there’s a little gang of toddlers running around, she very much doesn’t want to take part. Even if we go to the park, if there’s another child on the slide she will go and play somewhere else until it’s free.”
Eadie has grown more confident since starting preschool, but still prefers the company of adults. Like many parents, Handford and her husband wonder if this is temporary or whether the pandemic has in some ways shaped the person Eadie will grow up to be.
Something similar is true for Emily Knight and her husband. They spent the first lockdown at home in Grantham, Lincolnshire, working from home while juggling a baby and a two-year-old between them. When restrictions lifted last summer, Knight, who works for an MP, discovered that after so long without seeing other people, her children found being in a busy supermarket overwhelming. “My youngest screams at the notion of going near a swimming pool. Stuff that you build up with very small children to get them used to it – they haven’t had that,” she says. “They haven’t really interacted with people who aren’t in their immediate family. I now have a four-year-old who cowers in fear when a shopkeeper says hello to him.”
While many parents were initially concerned that Covid precautions such as constant hand-washing might have
