‘No sympathy’: Epidemic impact on children’s social skills United Kingdom

If Children have siblings and they mingle with others, they are socially at the same level as before the epidemic. But those who are only children and have just been at home with their mother and father do not know how to communicate.

They have problems sharing, getting too excited and taking turns. They are quite advanced in numbers and letters for their age because they were at home with adults, or they played a lot on tablets, but they are far behind socially, have no sympathy.

This is a fairly prosperous area where I work, there are not too many social problems. Slightly more middle-class children seem to be socially backward. They are more likely to have only children, have elderly parents and their parents are mostly office workers so they worked from home and were more isolated. Many children were given tablets.

It’s not the parents ’criticism because they were forced into that situation, but you can see it in the children’s social skills. In five years, social skills are everything, an indicator of how they will develop more than how they can say the alphabet or count to ten. Kids with good social skills and interaction, even if they are not quick to learn to read or write, often have the best educational results.

Parents are expressing high level of concern about how their children are developing. They ask, “Is my child normal?” Many parents say “my child is autistic” and the child is clearly not. They’re just presenting planned behaviors, they line things up and do things consistently, which is exactly how kids develop. We need to reassure them that this behavior is normal, that kidnapping a child is normal. The parents didn’t get a chance to talk to the other parent so they are at home and Google is doing something and it opens the can of worms.

Parents are certainly making it worse for their children socially and for themselves. We have a special little boy, he is four years old and he has never mingled with children. Mother is extremely nervous and so anxious about Kovid that she will keep him away as soon as she cries because she thinks she is hurt. He is a completely normal boy but he is not being given a chance because his worries are shifting in him.

There are a bunch of kids who will not be ready for school no matter what pre-school. In a pre-school with 30 children you will have four or five adults, in a school you will have one teacher. They don’t have time to take a baby to the toilet or settle them, the baby has to be ready.