Restoring Childhood, a necessary movement
It starts with us.
It is time to restore childhood.
The impact of pandemic restrictions on children over the past two years has yet to be fully understood, but, as parents who have watched our children and their peers rapidly deteriorate, we know it is grave. Children, for whom the risk of severe disease from COVID-19 has always been exceedingly low, continue to be burdened with the greatest restrictions. Socialization, education, sports, development have been stunted. The cancellation of physical activities, play, and children's sports led to an unprecedented deterioration in children’s physical and mental health and social and emotional development.
Childhood, as we knew it, has been interrupted. Today, we take back our children’s rights.
Whilst school closures have been incredibly detrimental to learning and socialization loss, other prolonged pandemic restrictions such as mask and vaccine mandates, testing and isolation, continue to have severe and widespread impact on children. Our pandemic response over the past two years has consistently deprioritized the education, health and welfare of children. We owe a collective duty to children to correct course, and to do so swiftly.
We are regularly asked what we mean by normal, what we think childhood should be restored to – is it just the end of COVID-19 mitigations like masks, testing and quarantines? Is 2019 what we consider normal?
Possibly. But we believe we can –and should– do better.
It isn’t possible to give our children the last two years back, but we can restore and protect their futures. We can work together as parents and advocates to push back against the continued COVID related restrictions that are either still in place or being reinstituted on children, such as the new mandatory masking policy in the San Diego Unified School District. We can take this moment in history as an opportunity to bring children forward and ensure that they will be protected from unwarranted and harmful restrictions in the future as well as set a precedent for an expectation of rigorous scientific inquiry, debate and evidence based policy metrics for children.
Our goals as an organization are simple- to restore and protect childhood, to require, encourage and support rigorous scientific inquiry with respect to policies that impact children, and to re-center children as a priority of our society.
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