Most people have been vaccinated from COVID and the U.S. government ended its COVID emergency powers back in May. Yet we are still reeling from the pandemic. I am not simply talking about how the pandemic affected mental health of millions. I am talking about the effects of the needless COVID restrictions, especially the lockdowns. I knew the lockdowns were a bad idea from the start. It turns out that lockdowns could not pass the muster of a basic cost-benefit analysis because the costs considerably exceeded any derived benefit.
The evidence for how lockdowns ruined millions of lives continues to ramp up. Earlier this month, the British think tank Institute for Fiscal Studies released a study with a long title: How did parents' experience in the labour market shape children's social and emotional development during the pandemic? The premise of this study is to determine the effects that parents' stability (or lack thereof) in the labor market affected the social-emotional skills of their children. It was not good, to say the least:
"Overall, the socio-emotional skills of children whose parents had stable labour market experiences throughout the pandemic - whether employed or unemployed the whole time - held up better on average than the skills of children whose families faced more economic instability. This suggests that it was the stability of parents' labour market experiences, rather than being in any particular economic state, that was an important determinant of children's socio-emotional development during the pandemic (p. 3)."
48 percent of children's social-emotional skills being worse off a year into the pandemic, as opposed to the sixth who had fewer challenged (ibid.). Or to translate that finding, "for every child that had fewer challenges during the lockdowns and school closures, three children ended up faring worse." After accounting for pre-pandemic skills, IFS found that "children whose families experienced at least one change saw, on average, their socio-emotional development worsen by about 9% of a standard deviation more than those whose families remained consistently employed or unemployed throughout."
This not only means a reduction in actual and future earnings for the parents: "The intergenerational impacts of economic uncertainty on child socio-emotional development are likely to operate through an increase in parental stress and possibly through a decrease in actual and expected expenditures on children (p. 25)." This also has the potential to stymie "better outcomes in later education, crime and health, and higher employment and higher wages in life (p. 23)." These findings are similar to the ones in a study co-authored by researchers at Cambridge University and Addis Ababa University about the social-emotional learning of Ethiopian students (Bayley et al., 2023).
A pet peeve of mine is when people like to blame all this fallout on the pandemic. The only direct costs of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are COVID-related illness, COVID-related morbidity, and COVID-related death. There are some other indirect costs related to health, such as crowded hospitals and burnt out medical staff throughout. As for everything else, that was not on the virus. The virus did not decide to close business or schools down. That was brought to you by the politicians who enacted short-sighted, myopic, and harmful regulations such as the lockdowns.
For some, blaming it on the pandemic is preferable to reminding us of the reality that the lockdowns were ineffective and came with considerable costs. At least IFS was intellectually honest enough to call out the culprit to declining social-emotional skills of children: "the disruption to parents' experiences in the labour market created by lockdown restrictions (p. 2)." The virus did not tell workers in multiple industries to not come to work and stay home. That was by government fiat. If the government bothered with standard risk assessment, cost-benefit analysis, or simply plain 'ole foresight, it would have been clear as day that lockdowns would come with considerable costs.
This was especially true for how lockdowns affected children. When I took the time in June 2022 to discuss the effects of COVID regulations on children, part of that analysis was showing how lockdowns exacerbated mental health issues and poverty for children across the world. Another part of that 2022 analysis was illustrating impeded educational attainment, which will eventually have negative impact on these future adults' lifetime earnings. Now we can add another cost to the list: declining social-emotional skills.
The negative impact of lockdowns on this generation of children is undeniable, and what makes it worse is that it was avoidable. I truly feel sorry for the children who had to go through the COVID pandemic. Seeing their ability to socialize with others and process their emotions stifled is only going to have greater costs as they develop into adults. Government leaders across the world need to acknowledge and learn from the cost of onerous lockdowns so another generation of children does not go through permanent emotional damage.
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