by the authors of SHTF Survival Bootcamp

The following is a conversation between Selco and Toby on how the mandates of the past two years have impacted the youth of today. For the full video, scroll down the to the bottom of the post.

Toby

So, up until now, we've been – we've been talking in very broad terms with a huge amount of information coming in over a period of time. And that's great because there's a lot of things to discuss, there's a lot of things to consider. But what we'd like to cover just briefly here now is something very, very specific. So it's a much tighter, much more focused, should we say, and completely unexpected? Unexpectedly, sorry, completely expectedly. But very worryingly, we're already starting to see new articles, reports, summaries, assessments of how COVID policies are affecting youth and children very, very much the negative.

And this is something that we want to get on people's radars as early as possible because, quite simply, the longer these children are left to cope with these struggles, even if the lockdowns or the restrictions over how long that lingers in them. Or how long it takes to process what's happened to them is going to be how bad it will be moving forward.

So what we want to do first is talk about what it looks like when it's gone wrong. And then what can we do to get it right, so Selco, obviously, you've written about extensively during the conflict there. In the region, children, sadly, were almost an afterthought. They just sort of got locked away and fed to be safe. And that was it for – for significant periods of time. Could you just tell us a little bit about how it actually was?

Selco

Yes. Problem was with this type because times and dangers were horrible. And many around us – around everybody. People, people tend to worry a lot how to protect their kids. Which is completely normal. And they protected a lot. But I think two things here where we used to be wrong in that times because over protecting the kids as a result of that all that people actually do with kids is kind of to keep them physically – physically protected. Physically safe from every danger. And – and that was it. 

Because other thing was that of course, every parents are the older family members, where you used to have a lot of things to do, a lot of jobs. So as soon as they physically protected the kids, they thought their task was done. And it was kind of done from the physical part of thing. But you – you had a whole bunch of kids in, in let's say sensitive years of the of their youth are looking on, on values and – and horrible amounts of violence around them. And those – all those kids were alone, what – what was happening without help of an older family members, majority, at least majority of those kids. And as a result, they grow up in, let's say, problematic young people.