Lockdown, nature and the next generation
I was delighted to read that Anne Longfield, England Children’s Commissioner, has said that children must be the priority after the pandemic. In her final speech after six years in the role, she said it was a “terrible thing” that “most of their lives would have got worse” during the pandemic.
This comes after warnings that children may be “losing all hope for their future” as surveys suggest young people’s mental health is worsening, partly due to the fallout from Covid-19. It’s not just rising levels of mental health that are concerning, but rising levels of abuse and neglect and the potential harm being done to the development of babies.
Research shows that the first two to three years of a baby’s life is the most crucial period of human development and it is believed that if children fall behind then they can find themselves at a lifelong disadvantage. Due to lockdown, babies have not been able to benefit from the stimulus of social contact that is vital for their development. Furthermore mothers are denied the support they need at this most confusing and exhausting time during the post-natal period (two years from birth).
The BBC reported that “There was an alarming 20% rise in babies being killed or harmed during the first lockdown, Ofsted's chief inspector Amanda Spielman has revealed. Sixty four babies were deliberately harmed in England - eight of whom died. Some 40% of the 300 incidents reported involved infants, up a fifth on 2019. Ms Spielman [Ofsted’s chief inspector] believes a "toxic mix" of isolation, poverty and mental illness caused the March to October spike. Health staff and social workers were hampered by Covid restrictions. And many regular visits could not take place, while others were carried out remotely, using the telephone or video links.”
Ms Spielman also said: "The pandemic has brought difficult and stressful times. Financial hardship, loss of employment, isolation, and close family proximity have put extra pressure on families that were already struggling. Poverty, inadequate housing, substance misuse and poor mental health all add to this toxic mix. You'll be well aware of the increase in domestic violence incidents over the summer - just one symptom of the Covid pressure cooker."
Over a quarter of all incidents reported to the child safeguarding practice review panel during 2019 involved non-accidental injuries to babies so there was already a concern about violence to babies let alone infants and older children. This often involves children being abused by young parents, or other family or household members, who have very little social support. The BBC reported “that the President of the Association of Directors of Children's Services Jenny Coles said Covid-19 was exacerbating many of the difficulties that families face and putting more vulnerable babies at even more risk. "The pandemic has seriously disrupted a key line of sight into the lives and homes of many families."
The closure of schools has also been a concern, not least because schools provide a place for learning, but because they also offer community focus and support, and provide visibility for those children who may be subject to abuse, neglect and harm at home. These children are deprived not only of an education, but of the lifeline that is provided to them through the school environment – for many it is the one place they feel truly safe.
Professor Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said, “when we close schools we close their lives”. In a meeting with MPs on the Education Select Committee earlier this month he was reported by the BBC as saying that “the pandemic has caused a range of harms to children across the board from being isolated and lonely to suffering from sleep problems and reduced physical activity – alongside school closures all children’s sport is currently banned”.
It’s not just the closure of schools that is an issue, but as Ms Spielman touched on above, the additional stress that the pandemic has put on families generally. Increasing numbers of families are subject to rising levels of unemployment and financial insecurity, and those who have retained their jobs (many are living in fear of losing their jobs) are having to juggle deadlines and their children’s home-learning, let alone deal with the disruption to family life as a result of lives lived together during lockdown. This has undoubtably led to an increase in domestic violence.
The BBC reported, “Domestic abuse has increased across the UK and the world during the coronavirus lockdowns, organisations have reported. The United Nations called the global increase in domestic abuse a "shadow pandemic". In the UK, charities say there has been a surge in demand for services, while police forces have also recorded a rise in incidents. Earlier this month, the UK's domestic abuse commissioner - whose role was set up last year - warned that demand for services was only going to increase further.”
All of this was happening before lockdown, the abuse to babies and children, to women, to men, all of us in some way harming others, at times to the point of death, but Covid has shone a light onto this. Today, Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer was reported by the BBC as saying, “Covid has exposed deep inequalities and injustices in society and the government needs to play a bigger role in the economy permanently. The UK’s collective sacrifice during the coronavirus pandemic must lead to a better future”
A vaccine, although it might well prevent unnecessary and early death, is not the only answer taken in isolation as if putting a sticking plaster on something already broken. We are broken! As a humanity we are sick and we are destroying our planet, the air is dirty, the water is polluted, the earth is plundered by mechanical processes, land is destroyed by fire and we’re even cluttering space now.
The Progression, a voice for peace, social justice and the common good, says, “pollution is the world’s leading cause of death, ahead of tobacco use, drug and alcohol use, and even war. The Global Alliance on Health and Pollution study, drawing on data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, frames pollution as one of the world’s largest, yet most neglected public health threats”.
This has to be our wake up call to look more honestly at the way we are each of us living and how this impacts on the collective, how as a society we need to find a way to live in harmony with all of life, including a virus. Fundamental to this is the need to take greater individual responsibility. This is the problem however: as a society we do not like to take responsibility. We have a medical model that does not encourage us to take responsibility, and we live in a blame and litigious culture that does not encourage us to take responsibility. At its root, we don’t know how to look after ourselves, not least our physical wellbeing but our mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing too – living in greater harmony.
In Ayurveda there is an emphasis on living in harmony with nature. My Ayurvedic doctor wrote, “As human beings, for us to thrive we cannot destroy other organisms created by Mother Nature. We all have to find our unique physiological and psychological balance in harmony with other living organisms. Coronavirus is also a living organism even though harmful to some human beings. It has its own place in this equation of life. If the body is in its optimum balance and correct pH level (according to Ayurveda – ushna and shita) it is harder for the virus to develop into a disorder even after entering the body. This is because the environment within the body would not be suitable for it to thrive.”
This is easier for some than it is for others. While there is increasing awareness of the metaphysical nature of our existence, in that we are more than just the body, a mind and spirit too, this has yet to infiltrate mainstream thinking. Even knowing that we are what we eat, what we think and how we live, many will not have access to the support they need to make changes in their lives to support their general wellbeing. Deprivation, poverty and inequality each have a role to play in health and wellbeing.
The UK government has recently added an additional 1.7 million people to its shielding list due to a new algorithm which has attempted to identify those most at risk from Covid, and this is based on a combination of age, ethnicity, body mass index and other health conditions and postcode. This highlights the manner in which inequality, where you live, can play a significant role in your quality of life and your susceptibility to illness and to Covid especially.
Thus the answer is not natural immunity alone but on socio-economic factors. It is complex! But one thing is for sure, the virus is not going anywhere. I have said this since last March, that at some point we need to learn to live with it and the politicians are now recognising this. Matt Hancock was quoted by the BBC as saying that new treatments would play an important role in "turning Covid from a pandemic that affects all of our lives into another illness that we have to live with, like we do flu. That's where we need to get Covid to over the months to come".
Covid is highlighting our need for change. As Diana Bereford-Kroeger writes, “Lately something has gone wrong. Nature is reacting to undue pressures and the fallout is here now in the form of Covid-19. Although its exact origins are uncertain, the stresses resulting from lost native species and habitats, missing links on the food chain, particulate pollution, and other environmental factors related to human activity and climate change have surely helped create the atmosphere in which the virus is thriving and looking for human flesh as its host.”
We each have a responsibility towards ourselves and towards the next generation. But somewhere along the way we lost ourselves and we stopped caring about the world we are creating for our children, for the next generation. We got greedy, we started to sell out, we forgot about the simple pleasures in life, about love and family, we wanted fame and fortune and outward validation of our worth in the world; we wanted to make our lives safer, make the unknown known, ensure an outcome.
Then a virus comes in and shakes the very foundation of our world and we are placed into lockdown, gripped in fear. Like a rabbit caught in a headlight, the world has been startled and stuck in time, groundhog day, each day resembles the next, underground, with little consideration to the bigger picture, to the effect, our choice and freedom are taken away from us, trapped, a pressure cooker, the heat rising and with no release. But what other option is there? Every action has a consequence, even the most well intended.
But the question remains, at which point do we consider that in our attempt to protect the vulnerable, we are instead creating greater vulnerability? Who is most vulnerable? Those birthing alone, those dying alone, those losing their minds because of loss of contact with the outside world, those suffering acute loneliness and anxiety and depression, those subject to domestic violence and abuse on a daily basis, women who can no longer protect their children, children who can no longer seek refuge in schools or with their friends and other family groups, those who long for connection, for love, for attention, denied all of this because of our healthcare system cannot cope, we are sick.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a very real loss, over two million people worldwide have died from Covid-19 over this year, albeit these figures include anyone who died from any condition but had Covid-19 in their system. I don’t envy any politician trying to weigh up all the odds, trying to find a way through a pandemic that so easily kills. But I do know that we have reached a point where we need to ask ourselves what it is that we are trying to achieve and to appreciate that the fundamentals of our society, the medical model and our approach to our health and wellbeing as much as our relationship to ourselves and to the planet needs to change.
Lockdown is not working for everyone, especially not for our children (albeit mine are very happy during lockdown) and this needs to be our last lockdown. We are in lockdown because of the strain on the hospitals so there does need to be a focus on natural immunity and doing what we can to increase the health and wellbeing of our population. This requires us to look at how we are living, at the very fabric of society and make changes, reduce inequality, reduce pollution, start caring, providing greater support at grass roots, ensuring parents have the support they need to be able to raise healthy and contented children - this is mental and emotional support as much as financial.
We need to let children be children, get outside, play and reconnect with nature, immerse themselves in it, so they start to recognise on a deep level that they are a part of nature, that nature is a part of us, that we are not separate from it and should stop destroying, plundering and raping it for our limited gain, because in the long run, it’s not just nature losing out, we lose out too. It’s not theorical – we really do need fresh air to breathe and fresh clean water to drink, these are fundamentals and should be a given.
We need to each of us take greater responsibility for our mental, emotional and spiritual landscape. To look at our trauma and our harm done and do something about it, free ourselves from our own suffering, not keep blaming it on others, as if we alone are victims of circumstance. Babies and children are victims of circumstance, they have no choice, we need to make better choices for them, by being better versions of ourselves, owning our stuff and transforming our negativity into positivity, learning to love and cultivate greater compassion for self and all of humanity.
It honestly has to start with us. This is the way. By each of us doing what we can to reduce our own suffering and those who suffer because of this. We need to start envisioning a new world for us, and for the next generation especially, one of greater freedom from fear, and greater connection to nature. Nature makes us feel better. We need to live in, immerse ourselves in, stop selling out on it. It’s time to get out of our left brains, transform our education system into something beyond mere learning for the sake of learning, learning to tap into more of our intuitive, empathic and imaginative nature, be more than we can possibly imagine.
As Henry Ford famously said, “If You Always Do What You've Always Done, You'll Always Get What You've Always Got.” So let’s do things differently this time. Our health and wellbeing is paramount. There should be no going back. Anyone who is still holding onto the idea of the life ‘returning to normal’ needs to move on and get a better grip on reality. This is a change that the world needs, if only we can find the courage to make the changes that it is presenting to us, if we can acknowledge our fear of the unknown and keep moving forward, to a place of greater love and compassion for ourselves and all of life; greater harmony.
I’ll leave you with the wise advice of Diana Beresford-Kroeger “This invisible agent called a coronavirus is round, with a tight protein membrane like a football, so it has speed when aerosolized by a sneeze or cough. The glycoprotein tentacles give the virus its glue. Therefore, the separation of six feet you’re hearing about is important because a ball will travel only so far. These are the laws of physics. But there are other invisible agents that can help instead of harm us. The biodiversity of our forests brings us many of the medicines we use to cure what ails us. And forests emit some of these medicines in the form of a multitude of medicinal aerosols.
Go outside and find yourself a pine tree. The white pine, Pinus strobus, is the best for the east. Any native low growing pine is good for the western seaboard. The bigger pine, P. sabiniana, is the best. Take twenty minutes out of your life in the company of these evergreens at noontime. They produce three aerosol molecules called pinenes. Inhale deeply in the presence of one of these trees and the T-cells of your circulating blood will immediately increase, boosting your immune system for free. This effect of one visit will last for thirty days. This is true for men, women, and children.
Get out into the sunshine. The sun and your skin are connected in ways that are extraordinary. The sun does a quantum trick, producing a UV-B wavelength, changing the precursor Vitamin D on your exposed skin into Vitamin D3. This vitamin helps to fight viral diseases. Look up and enjoy the feeling of warm sun on your body. And, don’t be too clean. especially now. Yes, wash your hands and don’t touch your face, but that daily shower washes the vitamin protection away.”
If you live far from the embrace of a pine tree, there still are things you can do to copy Diana’s natural approaches to keeping a healthy state of mind. She suggests, for example, smiling. Smiling boosts neiurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin and decreases the cortisol levels in the body, which is part of the flight-and-fight response. If you reduce the cortisol, you give a boost to your body and heart. “Smile and take life as it comes”, she says. And if you don’t like smiling? “try prayer or finding a cow or stone to stare at. Generosity of thought brings cortisol levels down, and we can all afford to be generous” she finishes.
