These four heartbreaking words show why we must never do lockdown again

We cannot say Covid is over when we have condemned a whole generation of innocent children to a lifetime of pain

It’s been haunting me all week. On Monday we published a letter from a mother in Wales, describing her family’s experience of lockdown. Both she and her husband had to work full-time from home – while their only child, a boy of six, grew desperately lonely. For months, he had no children to play with, and his parents were busy on Zoom calls, which he’d been told not to interrupt. And one day, this poor mother wrote, it just got too much for him. The little boy burst into tears – and sobbed: “Nobody wants me around.”
That simple, unbearably poignant sentence hit me so hard. Because, during lockdown, my family were in the exact same position. A mum and dad, working full-time from home – with an only child, aged six. And we saw for ourselves just how distressing lockdown could be, for a small, frightened boy.
Throughout that first stretch of the pandemic, in spring 2020, I wrote a daily lockdown diary column. But, feeling that the news was already grim enough, I always made sure to focus on the lighter side of what we were all going through. And there were, undeniably, some fun moments. I told jolly anecdotes about homeschooling, shopping, and growing a beard that made me look like the love child of Brian Blessed and a yew tree.
But I never wrote about the darker side. Specifically: the period when my son became terrified of leaving the house.
Even the suggestion of a family walk scared him. As soon as we got him out the door, he’d be in tears. By the time we were on the pavement, he’d be screaming. He was in no state to walk. So in the end, I would just have to carry him the whole way. 
But can you blame him? Of course not. He’d just turned six. How was a child his age meant to process the concept of lockdown, and to assess risk, the way adults can? All he knew was: everyone has to stay at home because there’s a killer virus. So it was only natural that – no matter how hard we tried to reassure him – he would come to fear that, if you merely set foot outdoors, you could die. 
Yet in reality, of course, there was no reason for him to be scared. Children – except those with severe existing health problems – were in next to no danger. The same was true for their parents, and teachers. When my son did eventually catch Covid, on his return to school, he had very mild cold-like symptoms, and was right as rain the next day. 
By then, mercifully, he’d managed to overcome his terror of the outside world. But I’ll never forget those tears. Or those screams.
Today, there can be no ignoring the fact that lockdown caused our children serious, lasting harm. And not just emotionally. Studies have found that it stunted their vocabulary, made them more violent, and even ruined their eyesight – because it was during lockdown that children became so hopelessly addicted to screens.
At Tory conference this week, James Cleverly admitted that locking down the young was a mistake. I want to hear other MPs admit it, too. I want them to read the letter from our reader. And I want them to picture a six-year-old boy sobbing, “Nobody wants me around.” Because those four heartbreaking words show why we must never put our children through lockdown again.
No one can pretend that running the country during Covid was easy. The Government of the day had to make hideously difficult decisions. The trouble was they focused solely on the dangers of not locking down. They barely considered the dangers of lockdown itself. Our children will have to suffer the consequences for the rest of their lives.