It’s hard to know how much lockdown is affecting my son. He’s now 22 months old and at this stage looks likely to be spending his second birthday in some form of quarantine or other. In a lot of ways, he got used to it quicker than we did, and we didn’t take much longer after that. One of the strangest parts of this whole saga has been how quickly it all became normal, barring my incessant longing for a mediocre meal in a mid-price Italian restaurant, and the constant low-level worry that he’s being starved of stimulus and will emerge from all this woefully behind all his friends because their mums and dads were actually good parents and had a nine-hour course of cultural delights planned each day.
It doesn’t help that so many of the ‘great ideas for young kids’ you see online are so complex and labour intensive, and when we try them on him he seems resolutely uninterested and happy to continue doing his same old thing. We read to him, play games, do painting and building, speak to him all day in full sentences and try to keep screens to a minimum. We video-call his nana and grandad and make sure he has a little run-around in the park for half an hour every day. But we still fear it’s not enough. That we’re not enough, and he’ll arrive at his first day back at playgroup saying ‘nee naw’ at his new fire engine, while all his playmates are tuning their violas and punning in Greek.
Most of the time he’s chipper about things, delighted to have us at close quarters and – we hope – too little to feel the constraints of being indoors pretty much all day. It’s just that any time he’s cranky or upset we feel guilty it might be because of his cloistered living arrangements, but that’s not really verifiable. As much as we may ascribe his moods to boredom, emotional distress or the lack of peer interaction, I’ve heard toddlers can be pretty temperamental at the best of times. We can’t tell how those same moods would be if he had been in full-time nursery, or going on all the action-packed, educational trips to museums and galleries we presume he’d now be taken on, despite never having been done so before.
‘How sad,’ we say, as he paws around behind the living room couch where all his toys are stacked, scrambling for something new to play with. ‘If it weren’t for lockdown, we’d probably be on a guided tour of the Large Hadron Collider right now.’
The harrowing truth of parenting is that, for the first time in my life, the things I do have a life-changing impact on another person. So it can’t be having no effect, all this. It’s just that the effects are unlikely to be those we predict, least of all the ones we fear the most due to our own insecurities. We have to have faith that a little bit of boredom won’t be too detrimental in the long run. It’s either that or viola lessons, and no one wants that.
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