How do you think the prolonged pandemic and the restrictions it is causing in countries around the world will affect children's education and mental health? If you have children, have you noticed anything different about them?

I was sure this was going to be long term and that's why in March of this year I decided to buy a house. We have a garden and barbecue a lot and the kids splash in the pool so they haven't been affected too much NOW. But pre march when we lived in a small apartment, I felt it was stunting their physical growth because they had no where to run, play and move. Buying a house was the best thing I did for my kids and I feel that now they are weathering the pandemic pretty well

Due to an early strict lockdown, Covid has been eliminated from my country and hence, my daughter goes to school as normal. Nothing has been affected.

My eldest went into a high school dorm this April. The normal plan is for first years to be in shared double rooms, but that's not possible, so she's in a double room that's been professionally partitioned down the middle. We're not allowed in, but the halved room looked very small on the videos she sent us. The common rooms in the dorm are all closed, so she socializes with other students in the same building on LINE or outside the school in a famiresu or the like. She seems to have settled in okay, but its a far from ideal situation.

My younger kids aren't so affected, we have no SoE here, but we haven't been able to have parties and our local festivals have all been canceled. I wanted to take the whole family to see their UK grandmother in April 2020 but that is still on hold.

It's hit my daughter pretty hard, ngl.

She's nearly 8 and we've now been effectively on a soft-lockdown for 2 years.

I am immuno-comprimised and we live with my husbands two aging parents who don't really care about getting covid and dying if I'm honest... my husband is also very busy with work so all of her free time is with me. Until I'm vaccinated (hopefully next month or maybe the following) I cannot really take her into crowded play spaces.

Like one of the posters above I also feel she's been stunted in her social growth. Of course she's in school but the kids sit at their desks and aren't allowed to chit chat when they eat... I never would have thought it would last this long. Her last 2 months of preschool, schools were closed. They had a socially distance pre-school graduation. At the time I thought okay this sucks but at least it's only now. But now she's half over with second grade and the covid cases in Tokyo are at an all time high. Her school issued her a laptop for distance learning possibly next semester. Basically all of her early memories will be with a cloud of the pandemic over her head.

A few months ago she wanted to go in our front yard and look at the tomatoes we planted... I didn't ask her to wear a mask (it's just outside our front door) but she realized she wasn't wearing one at the door, took off her shoes and ran back into the house to get a mask. She doesn't really understand why she's doing it but it's just second nature to her now. Outside is scary. The air is scary. Don't touch anything when we go outside.

I'm on board and we'll get through it, what other choice do we have? But I doubt anyone with children in a socially sensitive age bracket aren't thinking about the impact this will have on their kids.

In my home country it does. A family friend of mine who has kids that are 5 and 8 years old are having difficulties in learning online since their attention spans are not that well enough and tend to lean more on watching YouTube and play games once their computer opens. I'm also expecting that in places where kids are forbidden to go out, there will be more young ones in this generation who will become gamers and phone zombies since they can't play outside since 2020. I hope that when this thing blows over, kids will go outside and play with a vengeance and leave their gadgets at home.

Miyazaki schools are going on like always and have been barring from April to June last year.

Summer vacation starts Aug. 7 to 31. So our kids will be busy chasing dragon flies and feeding sparrows at the park.

As a parent of two young children this is a major concern for me.

The biggest worry I have is that they have both lost some major opportunities to build their social skills at key phases of their development (they are 6 and 3).

They still go to school and they still go to various extra curricular lessons so its not like they are completely isolated. But at the same time they haven't really gotten many chances to play with other kids outside those structured times. Before the pandemic we used to invite other families with kids their age over to our house, or go to visit them, so the kids could play together. Or we'd go to the park with other families or stuff like that. For my eldest in particular those were very good opportunities for him to play one on one with other kids outside the school environment. All of that has been stopped since the pandemic started and its a real loss.

For my youngest its been even more profound - she has literally spent half her life in a pandemic. Unlike my eldest she is too young to remember what life was like before so for her all this is normal - wearing masks everywhere, not inviting friends over to our place to play together, etc.

Both of them seem to be handling it OK, but I'm quite concerned that if they (and all other kids their age) can't go back to something resembling "normal" where families can more freely interact with each other its going to have long term negative effects on them.

The pandemic will just only amplify the situation that already has existed before. Who didn’t want to learn at school, now learns even less at home. Who wanted to learn more at schools (but couldn’t, because of bad equipment at school, unskilled teachers, bullying classmates) , now can learn undisturbed at home and with the internet like never before. The big rest or average isn’t affected so much though. Mental health issues during the pandemic are another problem catalog and of course not specific to children. They do and further will affect the society as a whole. Again here too, it’s just only amplified what has been existing already long time before the pandemic.

My kid is still too young to understand what is going on.

He knows that there is something going on, but he didn't clearly understand it.

He is wearing a mask all the time, but in other parts of his life, everything for him is as usual.