Growing With Covid

In the light of everything looking brighter - a glimpse of summer, an intentioned end in sight and successful vaccination roll out we’re looking closer towards the end of the pandemic, with Chris Whitty saying we will be treating coronavirus like the flu with no more lockdowns, I've been thinking about the impacts that continuous and lengthy lockdowns had on us all, especially on those living their most fragile and the influential years during them.

We’ve all experienced some sort of life change during the lockdowns, whether that be a slight change in mindset, from an evaluation of your pre-covid life, significant weight loss/gain or discovering more about yourself, from new hobbies to questioning your happiness. Change during a period of time is inevitable, but how much individual change have the lengthy lockdowns made to our lives?

I wonder if younger teenagers, around 13-15 are maturing prematurely. Have the lockdowns, especially the first, given them too much time to reflect on themselves at such an influential age? Spending too much time on TikTok as well as other social medias is bad enough at that age in the first place, but what else can they do? Especially if their school lessons aren’t seemingly ‘important’. An alarming feature of TikTok is that you can’t control much of what you see, and with lockdowns restricting how much of the ‘outside, real world’ you can see, are these young, impressionable teenagers seeing an unhealthy amount of hyper-realities? Although, could it also be a positive thing that teenagers at this age aren’t around the peer group, are they feeling more self-freedom to do what they want, and understand individually, who they are? Is this too early though, surely we all have to go through awkward but shaping phases in school? But if we didn’t, in the long run, would society be made up of more independent and happier individuals?

I’ve realised older teenagers are becoming more chilled out, which in my opinion is a good thing, especially regarding education and futures. We’ve been made more aware about the unnecessary educational pressure put on us, highlighted by how the government have been controlling education during lockdowns, and how unreasonable linear exams actually are. Many of us are realising teacher assessed grades based upon a multiple of factors are fairer and more logical, as well as better for our overall mental health. With so much future uncertainty and a year full of continuous social disappointments, relating to festivals, parties etc being cancelled that motivate us in our day to day life, a ‘what happens, happens’ attitude is becoming a hegemonic approach to life across our generation. Maybe coronavirus lockdowns have made us more accepting to the ambiguity of life, we now know that you never know what's 'around the corner', or where you will be in the future and we have to accept that.

My Dad was telling me his thoughts on the generation of covid-babies whilst doing the shopping, explaining to me that he realised a lot of young children have only seen adults wearing masks most of their lives, maybe they’re going to think that’s a norm? But then I thought, are the lockdowns even going to be remembered by young children, or are they so adaptable that it won’t make a difference? Or is the lack of socialising with other children at their age going to have some sort of impact on their generation? Most of us can’t remember half of of our young childhood, so are they actually the luckiest generation involved in lockdowns? Due to furlough and the new norm of working from home, 'career Mums' as well as working Dads may feel particularly lucky (sometimes!) being able to spend so much time with their children in precious years whilst also working on their careers.

For everyone, coronavirus lockdowns gave us time to think (possibly too much) and made us learn what’s actually important in life. We have realised the most important things in life are the ones that bring us joy. For some people, joy was found in masses of guilt-free alone time, however, others realised how necessary other people in their life are to theirs. Many of us also realised that the unity of people is so important and can be more important than rules and temporary laws, relating to the BLM and sexual assault protests which both occured during lockdowns.

Or maybe the lockdowns have made no difference to younger generations, except helping their parents live longer, which is always a positive.