‘We Should Hang Our Heads in Shame Over the Way We Have Treated Children in Lockdown’

Professor of Psychology Ellen Townsend, a member of HART, has appeared on Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan’s podcast Planet Normal to tell them how harmful lockdowns have been to the nation’s children.

For Professor Ellen Townsend, it’s simple: “We’re putting adults first when we should be putting children first.” The result, according to the University of Nottingham academic, is “a real disaster” for young people and an approach she feels the country will come to regret, citing widely-reported mental health concerns and a sharp increase in youth unemployment.

Speaking to The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, Professor Townsend tells columnists and podcast hosts, Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan, why she believes it’s now vital for the Government to implement a “trauma-informed recovery approach” to ease young people out of lockdown. The emphasis, she says, should lie on mental recovery rather than catching up on school work: “If we don’t have mental health and wellbeing, the learning is just not going to take place.” And a second plan is needed for the “morally questionable” way in which she believes the Government has induced fear in the young: “If I were to induce any kind of emotion in the lab, for example, I would ethically expect to make sure that people left the lab feeling as good or better than they did when they came in… I’d have an exit plan. What worries me about what has happened is there doesn’t seem to be an exit plan to de-escalate the fear.”

Worth listening to in full (no subscription required).