The kids aren’t alright — and neither are their parents

There is a story currently doing the rounds about a group of mothers in Massachusetts who gather on a football field to howl into the freezing dark in collective despair at the nightmare that is pandemic parenting. I envy them. My attempts to organise the south London equivalent are scuppered by the fact that I can’t leave the house. All the children have Covid.

But I don’t really need to head outside. My WhatsApp groups — long the lifeblood of the chattering breeding classes — form a collective howl all of their own. There’s the 37-week pregnant friend whose whole family has gone down with the virus. The family currently battling their second variant in as many months. Multiple parents looking after the kids and working, while a partner isolates. My phone pings every five minutes with questions about incubation times, how to isolate siblings in a small house and what the logins to Google Classroom are again.

For most of the pandemic, parents have largely got on with it. Everyone was in the same situation, and most children were known not to be high risk. Sure, lockdown parenting was its own slice of hell, but at least we were protecting the grandparents, waiting for the vulnerable to get vaccinated and generally doing our bit for society.

But as vaccine access rolled down the age groups, young children remained seemingly unnoticed. Other countries started to vaccinate their five- to 11-year-olds. The UK did not. Then the boosters began, shortly followed by a worryingly infectious new variant. Still, no word came on what the government planned to do about the primary school set.

As Omicron burnt through the population, children proved easy tinder. The latest Office for National Statistics infection survey shows declines for all age groups save the under-16s, where case rates are spiralling ever upwards: 11.8 per cent of those aged between two and 11 currently have Covid — the most infected demographic in the UK and the least vaccinated. My eight-year-old contracted it three days after going back to school. Two days after she finally went back, my five-year-old got it. Three days later, the two-year-old did too.

As many a parent of young children can attest, sometimes you just want someone else to tell you what to do. There’s a reason parenting manuals are a multimillion-pound industry. But in this instance, the silence from politicians and government scientists is deafening. Or it would be, if it weren’t filled with small people asking for more Calpol. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests minimal risk of vaccine side effects and yet, after a long silence, the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has only recently approved jabs for higher-risk primary schoolchildren. There is still no timeline for the rest of them.

Parenting requires pragmatism. “It’s good they’re getting it over and done with,” we say. But you can’t stop the flickers of terror. The odds are that most young children will make a full recovery, but what if this is one of the fevers that doesn’t go down? What if you have to go to the hospital and there aren’t enough paediatric nurses? What if long Covid hits?

The children of the pandemic have absorbed too much already. The youngest in this cohort were already behind in speech and language when they started school post lockdown, according to the Education Endowment Foundation. By the end of the last academic year, they were still months behind in reading levels. The government has provided only a small percentage of the money experts requested to make up the educational shortfall. Caregivers are flagging anxieties about surging mental health issues in children from toddlers to teenagers.

The guidance is now for everyone to go back to the office. To embrace endemicity. To go on as normal. But how do you square that with endless isolation periods? You can’t hire additional childcare when your children are ill. (Not that there is any; au pairs are in short supply due to Brexit.) Many nurseries are overwhelmed, while schools are facing an epidemic of staff absence due to sickness, with one in 12 teachers estimated to be off at the start of this term.

It is right that children weren’t the most pressing issue at the start of all this. They may still not be. But pretending they’re just not there — when they are unvaccinated, sitting targets for catching and spreading the virus — is ridiculous. As life goes back to normal for many others, parents will keep picking up the pieces in our offspring’s health and education, muttering about teaching them the much-feted skill of resilience as we do so. But it would be nice if someone asked just how resilient we all have to be.

Alice Fishburn is the FT’s opinion and analysis editor. Email her at alice.fishburn@ft.com

Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first