I can just about remember the three-day week imposed by Ted Heath’s Conservative government in 1974. Energy rationing meant my primary school was deemed too cold so we had a day off. I recall the sense of youthful camaraderie. A national crisis had dealt us deliverance from tyranny.
In March 2020 I related this to my teenage daughter Chloe, trying to cheer her up as the first Covid-19 lockdown kicked in. “You missed 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash probably didn’t mean much to you — this is your first historical trauma. You’ll laugh about it one day,” I told her.
How foolish I feel about making light of it now. Those lockdowns weren’t a historical curiosity. Almost three years later I see them as the trigger for bouts of anxiety and depression that have dogged my daughter’s life and the lives of many of her peers.
There has been a long tail to this particular mental health comet. The number of under-18s in England who were referred for mental health treatment on the NHS rose by 39 per cent to 1,169,515 in 2021-22, it emerged yesterday. Separate NHS Digital data shows rising hospital admissions for eating disorders with 7,719 admissions in 2021-22 among under-18s, up from 4,232 in 2019-20 — an 82 per cent rise in two years.
We got through the first weeks of lockdown promisingly enough. My wife and I gamely leapt about to Joe Wicks, went on family walks and took to home baking while Chloe sat upstairs revising for her A-levels. But as the days wore on our daughter’s outlook darkened. At 18 you are looking beyond family boundaries at the wider world. The gateway to this longed-for independence is exam success and it soon became obvious she was struggling.
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“I just don’t know how to do this,” she would say, slumped, head in hands, over her maths book. I didn’t know how to do it either and the promised school Zoom tutorials never seemed to materialise. History and English essays were diligently set, but never marked.
I’ve heard from so many parents that their sons adapted to the lockdown restrictions with glee. They sneaked out for football kickabouts in the park. They played endless games of Minecraft. My daughter felt the pandemic was not an opportunity to bunk off, but a cancellation of the future. Anger and anxiety about her A-level prospects impinged on her sleep. Lack of sleep fed loss of energy and depression.
By contrast, my marriage thrived. I saw more of my wife than I ever had and our bond grew stronger. We even decided that post-pandemic we would work less and travel more. It took me a while to realise that our “boomer” happiness was hurting her. “It’s OK for you, you’ve had a life,” she said to me. “Is this really how it’s going to be for me for ever?”
Her older sister Tamsin had managed a gap year and graduated from uni before the pandemic, which was simply further proof that, for Chloe, the drawbridge had come up. We had moved from London to a suburban town to give our girls a better life. Ironically, this contributed to her sense of anxiety and isolation. Even when the tier system allowed, she couldn’t easily travel and see her friends. Her social life migrated online and that was a disaster for her self-esteem. There was lots of competitive gossiping about who was sneaking out to hook up in the park. There were heated arguments about whether it was fair that the privately educated children in her friendship group were getting excellent online tuition compared with her state school. There was poisonous stuff about who was actually eating their home-baking produce and getting fat and who wasn’t and getting thin.
Re-entry into the world at the beginning of 2021 improved things. Chloe saw her friends again and in the summer was able to get a job working in a city restaurant. But even that confronted her with the lockdown mental health crisis, albeit at one remove. Working for a hard-pressed manager in the hospitality sector was tough. Her boss was stressed, angry and demanding. No wonder. He was trying to save his business and had lost a grandparent in the pandemic.
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● The rise of the teen recluse
● Steep rise in number of children treated for mental health problems
Last autumn Chloe finally went off to university. She has certainly been toughened up by her Covid experience, but the aftershocks are still there to be seen among her peer group. Her flatmates are inundating university counselling services with anxiety and depression symptoms or manifesting their anger in other ways.
This is a generational mistrust of all authority. And that’s not just because they find it hard to forgive or forget Boris Johnson’s lockdown parties or Matt Hancock’s jungle escapade. They now see the pandemic not as a blip, but an event heralding a state of permanent distress. They worry about the price of heating. They have to seek out the cheapest food at the supermarket. They are facing a student debt mountain. Their lecturers go on strike. They struggle to get home to visit because of the rail strikes.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me I’m wrong to feel like shit because you’ve seen this all before,” my daughter said to me over Christmas. I’ve learnt my lesson. I’m taking what she says seriously.
