Four years after the official start of the pandemic, two years after practically all restrictions were lifted, and roughly one year after it was declared to be over, the consequences of the lockdowns, quarantines, school closures, mask mandates, and other restrictions can still be seen in its aftermath long after these restrictions were lifted. This is especially true among children and young people, whose development has been delayed, stunted, or arrested as a result.
It is a truly massive elephant in the room!
Now, the temptation would be to knee-jerkedly raise age limits for various things in response to this, up to and including even the age of majority itself. You know some people want to. But that would only exacerbate such developmental delays in practice by kicking the can even further down the road. The specious idea that "kids today are infantilized, so let's infantilize them even further, because reasons" is absolutely insane. If anything, we should be doing the opposite and lowering or even abolishing various age limits (within reason), and giving young people a megadose of independence. That is, go "straight from zero to the Fourth of July", like the song by the band The Killers says, in both the real AND virtual worlds, and certainly no later than age 16. And at the very, very least, seriously, let's NOT add any more restrictions whatsoever on the already most heavily monitored and (in many ways) restricted generation of children and teens in all of recorded history.
Infancy cannot be re-run. Childhood cannot be re-run. And, try as so many adults may, adolescence cannot be re-run either. The best thing to do is to build a time machine and go back to March 2020 and make it so the lockdowns, school closures, etc. never happened, and that we adopted the "flu strategy" per the original pandemic plan from the get-go per the wisdom of the ages. Failing that, the second best thing is to rectify things as best we can, yesterday.
The latest attempts to abruptly restrict or revoke teens' access to the virtual world will leave a "social media-shaped hole" in the lives of millions that will most likely NOT be filled with anything good. And after decades of gradually restricting and reducing their access to the real world, it would be a bait-and-switch to disingenuously claim that children and teens will now all of sudden be given more access to the real world in order to fill the void. Most likely, they will lose access to both the real AND virtual worlds, and increased access to the real world will NOT be forthcoming for a while.
True, the virtual world is no substitute for the real world, as we have all learned the hard way during lockdown. But as renowned sociologist and youth rights activist Mike Males says, "The dangers of both the virtual and real worlds have been wildly exaggerated. Teens don’t need more restrictions." Truer words have never been spoken.
And will today's youngest generations, and future generations, ever forgive us?
(Mic drop)
UPDATE: What would be a good shorthand to describe what needs to be done? Twenty-One Debunked thinks we should call it the "Reverse Icelandic Model", that is, the reverse of the vaunted Icelandic Prevention Model (IPM). When the pandemic and related restrictions and isolation intersected with the existing IPM that had been in place for two decades, it really did a number on the mental health of young people in Iceland.
