‘Tragic human cost’: The children in care left behind by coronavirus

Lockdown has been a difficult time for many. While the plight of elderly people in care homes has rightly been the focus of much political controversy, the suffering of children in care and the children of prisoners has been all but overlooked. 

Since the start of the first lockdown in March, some social workers and prisons made the decision to end all physical contact between parents and their children. Family members who raised objections were pointed to “government guidelines” which supposedly prohibited this contact – they did no such thing. In fact, the guidelines put in place in March mandated an individualised approach for children in care – and, given the complexity of each individual case, rightly so. 

For foster carers with underlying medical conditions, for example, a pause in physical contact between children they care for and people from other households was sensible; but what the guidelines did not mandate was that children in care should be subject to a blanket policy and stopped from having all physical contact with their parents.  

Children occupy a place of particular vulnerability – they have no control over the family they’re born into, over whether their parents will be poor, incarcerated, or suffering from poor mental health, a profound disability, a substance abuse problem, a gambling addiction or a domestically violent relationship. A child cannot determine how much food is in their house, nor whether the electricity bill is paid. They can be locked in rooms, left hungry, frightened and cold while their parents struggle with whatever their particular difficulties are, and in some horrifying cases the children are violently attacked and sexually abused. And they cannot escape – a four-year-old cannot just walk out and take themselves to safety – they have nowhere to go; and by the time they’re old enough to walk round to a friend’s house, many don’t want to go, because they’re attached to their parents, protective of them, and very often in a caring role for their younger siblings.  

Against this backdrop, it is hoped that responsible adults would come in and protect that child. Part of that means understanding the complexity of their relationship with a parent who cannot care for them properly. The system of taking children into local authority care in the UK does some of that, at least in theory – it is rare that a child removed from their parents is denied all physical contact with them. Not least because it is hoped that with the right support the parents will be able to care their children again, but because it is also in the best interested of the child to maintain a relationship with their primary caregiver. An alcoholic mother is still irreplaceable in the eyes of her child. A father serving a prison sentence can still be keenly missed. In most cases social workers, family law courts and prison governors recognise this, and a plan is put in place for the child to have regular contact with their parents – including while court proceedings over child custody are ongoing and where a child is going into a prison to see their parent. 

For many of these children, contact with their parents is the highlight of their week – it’s looked forward to until it happens, it’s thoroughly enjoyed while it takes place, and there is real sadness when it’s over. I have seen the crestfallen look on a child’s face when this contact is cancelled and I have seen how heavily the longing weighs upon them in the days in between those precious sessions. I’ve spoken to a foster carer who told me that the toddler she cares for sometimes wakes in the night, crying, calling for his mother. I was told of a three-year-old who bursts into tears when he sees his foster carer – his kind, dedicated foster carer – come to pick him up, as that means the end of his time with his mother, who he won’t see again for a long time. And I have seen the looks of pure disappointment on the faces of older children when they know their time is up.

If you’ve known the heartache of loss or grief you may have some idea of the pain this causes a child. At least as an adult, you are protected by some degree of emotional maturity. For a six-year-old child in the middle of court proceedings about whether they’ll go home to their parents or spend their childhood being raised by a series of paid foster carers, things are very different – the precious time they have with their parents can be given or taken away at a moment’s notice. Sometimes it has to be taken away, for good reason (though all recognise this should be the last resort). But sometimes it is taken away without any good reason, and that is exactly what happened during lockdown to some children in care or those with a parent in prison.

The children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, says that the government’s Covid-19 guidance states that face to face contact “be assessed on a case by case basis” and she says she is concerned that “some blanket policies of no face to face contact had been introduced and the balance of risk to children of not seeing their families had not been given sufficient weight”. 

She is right – some social services were quick to shut down contact between parents and children at the start of the first lockdown. In one case, after weeks of pleading from the child’s family, the social worker for a two-year-old accepted he could meet his parents, providing it was outdoors, he stayed two metres away from them at all times and the foster carer was “very vigilant” to ensure hugging was avoided (the child attended nursery every day, where he could freely hug the staff and the other children). The children of separated parents, meanwhile, (many of them educated, empowered, and vocal) were allowed to move freely between their two homes.

Children in care are joined in this unhappy existence by the children of prisoners. Jake Richards, a barrister representing a group of such children, tells me about a little boy who suffers from congenital hydrocephalus, a rare brain condition, and muscle spasms, which severely affect his mobility and require him to use a wheelchair. Richards is helping him take legal action against the Ministry of Justice to challenge the ban on visits by children to parents in prison. The boy currently wakes most nights crying for his dad, who is serving a three-year prison sentence and cannot help with the exercises that ease the pain in his son’s legs. The prison offered telephone calls, but the child’s medical condition means he struggles to understand what is being said to him when he can’t see the face of the person speaking. On occasions when he has been allowed to speak to his father over the phone, he has turned to his mother and said, distressed, “What’s he saying? What’s he saying?” His mother has now made the difficult decision not to allow any more telephone calls, so that means no contact at all, between a very unwell child with a reduced life expectancy and his dearly loved dad.  

This is inhumane, entirely avoidable and profoundly morally wrong, not just because of the suffering it brings, but also because of the long-term adverse consequences it can cause. Dr Andrew Dellis, a South African research psychologist and director at child mentoring programme SAYes, says that separation from a primary caregiver may undermine the security of the attachment bond, which is the base on which a child builds all social relationships. If that bond is insecure, everything else we rely on for a stable society – reciprocal and boundaried relationships, measured emotional responses, clear rational thinking – is resting on a fragile foundation. Dr Dellis explains that the experience of a secure social bond throughout childhood is as basic a need as food and water, and that caregivers are the primary bedrock of these attachments. 

In his work at SAYes, which mentors children and young people in institutional care in South Africa to help their transition to adult life (there is little to no state support in the country after the child turns 18), Dr Dellis has seen all too frequently how fractured social bonds in childhood play out in early adulthood, and how varied, grave or enduring these effects can be. They can show up as mood disorders, emotional illiteracy, poor self-worth and self-efficacy, very poor concentration and memory and challenges with impulse control impacting violence, substance use disorders and even obesity, he says. With such a raft of potential ill-effects, crude separations can contribute harm far into the distance of a child’s life, undermining their friendships, education and work prospects, steering them towards relationships that replicate their childhood adversities and, of course, increasing their risks of ending up in the criminal justice system.  

He also explains that for some children it is hard to process or internalise the cessation of contact in a way which is balanced and proportionate to events as they are. A child cannot easily understand why they are being denied access to their parent or mitigate their strong emotional need for connection. Instead, they experience rejection, a craving for their parent and a feeling of helplessness. Externally, we see this as children reaction with anger and distancing, or with outbursts and clinging in response to the perceived rejection. A shift to apathy and disengagement from the world around them can become the only way of making sense of a need for connection far beyond their control. 

Sophie McElroy, a teacher and educationalist, is appalled when I tell her this has been happening to children during lockdown. She works to bring trauma-informed teaching practice into schools, and explains that children whose brains have been damaged by repeated adversity, such as sudden separation like this, could be suffering from trauma. That trauma interferes with a child’s ability to make good decisions, including about how to behave in a classroom, and so these children could find themselves punished for their behaviour, leading to their withdrawal, disengagement and refusal to attend school, or even their permanent exclusion. For me, this seems a particularly cruel sequence for these children, because while everything else is chaotic, and important adults come and go in a way completely beyond their control, school is often the only reliably available safe place they have in their life. To end up excluded from it because of their entirely understandable reaction to – yet another – avoidable trauma, is an injustice too far.

And yet there is more – an almost ceaseless stream of misery flows from the failure to take good care of a child. The consequences pervade every area of their life. With the whole world gazing at the potential hope of a vaccine right now, I looked at how childhood trauma might interact with the immune system and found research reporting (mostly negative) associations between chronic psychological stress and vaccine responses. Prolonged separation from a parent can cause stress that leads to higher cortisol levels, and children with higher cortisol levels after starting nursery have been found to have lower antibody responses to the vaccine for pneumococcal – a disease which can cause lung damage and meningitis, both of which can be fatal.

These children will have suffered already, many of them in ways those of us with the privilege of safe, happy childhoods would struggle to comprehend. Being cut off from physical contact with their parents is but one example of that suffering – but it is one we can prevent. We cannot go back in time and cure all the ills that put them in care or their parent in prison in the first place, but we can, and should, avoid inflicting any more.

Shadow secretary of state for justice David Lammy was characteristically pulling no punches when asked about what was happening: “It cannot be right for children, who have themselves done nothing wrong, to be denied all contact with their parents for months on end. The government’s shocking failure to get a grip on this pandemic is having a tragic human cost.” As ever that tragic human cost is one encountered far more severely by those at the margins of society who are easy to forget, and rarely make it into the rooms where powerful people make decisions, than by anyone else. 

Had we a truly diverse parliament, fewer MPs with an expensive private school education, and more with the real life experiences and wisdom that being in care or having a parent in prison can bring, this situation would look very different indeed. There are many MPs, indeed even our prime minister, whose children don’t live with two parents, and their situation was recognised and dealt with humanely early on. Not so the children I’ve been writing about today, who are being so miserably, wretchedly failed it should shame us all. Those children deserve hope. They deserve a childhood which leaves them in no doubt that they matter, that they are entitled to be happy, that their dreams are important, that they are loved and that somebody, somewhere, with a voice and some power, is fighting for them.