Of course it’s not as good. But there’s a wide excluded middle between “not as good” and “irreparable harm.”
We are an adaptable species, currently adapting to a pandemic. Which, in case you’re unaware, we have done before (see: bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, polio). For most of these we couldn’t get out of the way fast enough to avoid harm as much as we are right now, but the number of enduring and significant deep social changes that resulted from just the bubonic plague, cholera, and malaria alone are staggering. Look into the way we changed how we access water once we learned how cholera circulates.
You said it would screw up some kids for a long time. I sincerely doubt it will screw up many kids for even a short time. In little bands of hunter gatherers there may not have been other same-age children at all, and I bet those kids learned to make facial expressions from doing so with their parents and other “authority figures”. Plus, kids are on zoom and watch TV and stuff. And outdoors they can talk to other kids they aren’t close to.
Closest analogue to COVID is Spanish Flu. I don’t know that much of anything was actually learned from that. I may have missed something, however.
As the paper says, societies can certainly fail to meet many challenges again and again. Famine, drought, pestilence, you name it.
I suppose, maybe, we’ll learn to respond more quickly. Like New Zealand. We certainly could get closer. I’m unconvinced we’ll do any better. I don’t think we’ll learn.
Plus, the masks and social distancing required to mitigate the pandemic have potentially negative downstream affects on society in their increase in isolation. I suppose we could compensate for that. Don’t know if we will in the short run, or even the long run.
Lots of people suffered psychological damage from growing up during WWII living in one of the combatant countries. Oddly enough society continues today in all those countries.
Was/is WWII or COVID a durn shame compared to a nicer friendlier world where those things never happened? You bet.
Is it beyond collective human coping to deal with these challenges? Not even remotely.
We will adapt and (mostly) overcome. As we always do.
Maybe kids who see a lot of people in masks will develop better skills at reading faces.
I really don’t think it’s going to make a huge difference for most kids. They’ll all see their parents unmasked. They’ll probably all see people on TV, too.
The fact that social distancing makes it easier for shitty abusive parents to hide the abuse from outsiders is likely the biggest problem for kids. But i know that social workers are still going into the homes of foster kids to monitor stuff. And teachers now get to see the parents interact with kids, too. It’s not as if we’ve completely removed all barriers to abuse.
