Editors’ Note: This article, edited by Colin Alexander, is based on a chapter written by Rachael Alexander and published in Colin Alexander’s latest book, Fear and Loathing in the Pandemic: Propaganda and Misinformation during Covid-19.
According to UNICEF, children should always be prioritised because “the health and well-being of children – and perhaps the future of the world itself – depends on placing children at the centre of all policies” (1) This is because who we become as adults, and thus the societies we form, is dependent on our childhood experiences. Personality, stress regulation, socialisation, attachment, emotional development, morality, neurobiology, and immune system functioning are all shaped by early childhood experiences. For healthy development to occur across all these domains children require emotionally attuned, responsive, and psychologically safe relationships. (2)
Drawing on extensive research from evolutionary neurobiology, developmental psychology and anthropology, (3) Darica Narvaez has argued that for much of human history, prior to the last ten thousand years (which represent only a fraction of the roughly three hundred thousand years that homo sapiens have existed), ‘evolved nest’ care ensured children’s developmental needs would largely have been met. This caregiving system enabled children to develop well and become members of small communities that valued generosity and sharing rather than the hierarchy or coercion that we witness today. The components of the evolved nest have also been examined across a wide body of research since the mid-twentieth century. Studies in developmental psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, attachment research, and public health consistently highlight the importance of these caregiving practices for children’s physical, emotional, and social development.
It is now well researched and understood that adverse childhood experiences like abuse, violence, and family dysfunction increase the likelihood of mental distress, risky behaviours and illnesses and diseases in adulthood. (4) However, there can be a misconception that children are ‘fine’ if there is no obvious adversity, such as clear cases of abuse, occurring in their lives. The evolved nest theory indicates that a lack of adversity is not a sufficient baseline for optimum human development. Children who do not receive elements of evolved nest care are likely to be underdeveloped socially and cognitively because the quality and availability of these aspects of caregiving shape their biology and sociality, influencing the kind of moral and social dispositions people develop. (5) Without these elements of care the right hemisphere of the brain becomes underdeveloped, affecting empathy, emotional intelligence, and self-regulation. (6)
Official communications during the Covid-19 pandemic were a clear example of how children are harmed by a society that reduces parental capacity. This was evident in public messaging that did not recognise the critical role of parents and caregivers in sustaining children’s wellbeing. Adults were primarily addressed as workers or citizens responsible for upholding the restrictions rather than as caregivers within family systems. By centring discourse and policy design around economic, business and school continuity, official communication tended to marginalise emotional, relational, and practical caregiving. This framing implicitly normalised the idea that childcare could be accommodated in the margins of working life and were for families themselves to navigate rather than matters of collective and crucial importance.
The ‘invisibility’ of caregiving stress as discussed by Gabor Maté was also evident in pandemic communications and priorities. At the time, it appeared almost unquestionable that children would need to be isolated and parents would have to prioritise paid work, schooling, and basic logistical survival. Caregivers were not enabled or encouraged to be emotionally present with their children. In fact, most were put under conditions that made this increasingly difficult to do, with little acknowledgement of how this in turn can significantly harm children in the moment and impact their longer-term development. For many adults, who themselves have likely experienced a lack of evolved nest care, it can be difficult to fully understand or acknowledge the importance of children’s emotional and relational needs and the harm done when these are not met, meaning such conditions go unchallenged or feel acceptable. (7)
From a neurobiological perspective it is known that an individual’s ability to think and make well informed decisions decreases when anxiety and stress increase. When we perceive a threat, the emotional brain can temporarily override the thinking brain. Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist and expert in interpersonal neurobiology, describes this brain experience in metaphor as ‘flipping your lid.’ (8) Neurobiologically, this refers to the prefrontal cortex (thinking brain), the area responsible for emotional regulation, impulse control, and rational decision-making, temporarily shutting down. Meanwhile, the amygdala and other limbic system regions (emotional brain) dominate, prioritising survival reactions (often described as the fight, flight, freeze, fawn responses) over more reflective or longer-term thinking. In situations of immediate and real danger, this is exactly how we need to respond, but because during the pandemic there was no immediate ‘enemy’ to ‘fight’ but instead an ongoing complex situation, this risked people potentially being in a ‘flipped lid’ state for a prolonged period of time, with stress hormones consistently in the body. This can be problematic, as sustained activation of the stress response can lead to a range of negative outcomes, including increased risk of anxiety and depression, impairments in learning and emotional regulation, and long-term physical health problems, making this type of communication ethically irresponsible on account of the harm it can inflict upon both mind and body. (9)
During a pandemic when helpful, collective and wise action was most needed, a ‘flipped lid’ state was probably the least helpful brain and nervous system state to be in. In this state, thoughts and actions are driven by our threat responses and we are at risk of losing the cognitive capacity to think of others’ welfare and are more likely to be preoccupied with our own needs, mainly our own immediate survival. The unhelpful behaviours seen in the pandemic, such as people stockpiling food and toilet rolls, and the anger and division that occurred as people judged one another’s behaviours, becomes more understandable when considered as nervous system reactions and through the neoliberal culture of individualism and competition that is encouraged to prevail.
Children are even more vulnerable to being negatively impacted by fear and other forms of coercive messaging, as they often lack contextual knowledge, critical thinking skills and agency, and require the adults in their lives to help them regulate stress. Children’s ability to stay emotionally regulated is further reduced when being cared for by adults who are stressed themselves or in a ‘flipped lid’ state, because children naturally attune to their caregiver’s nervous system state. Coercive communication can create emotional distress, learned helplessness, passiveness, trauma responses, and a mistrust of all authority regardless of its intent or wisdom. For children particularly, such messaging risks social learning effects, teaching that threats, fear, manipulation and the use of coercive rewards are acceptable tools of communication, patterns they may then replicate in their own friendships and relationships.
An alternative would have been for those in charge to tell the truth about the complexity and unknowns of the situation, for human complicity in the situation to be acknowledged and responsibility taken, for emotional impacts to have been named empathetically, for the huge role of social inequality and the disproportionality of the impacts to have been deeply acknowledged, and for wartime/enemy and fear-inducing language to have been avoided completely. Young people (and the rest of us too) need leaders who can hold and discuss complexity and multiple perspectives, show vulnerability, and model emotional maturity and fluency. Instead of pitting people against each other, narratives and language could have been more suggestive of care, compassion and connection. Messaging about social distancing could have included the importance of maintaining connection and friendly relationships. Government advisory committees and public briefings should have included experts from other areas of science, particularly those specialising in child development, to minimise the impact of restrictions on children. The briefings then might have helped people feel calmer and more connected to others and encouraged a process of holistic understanding of what was occurring while acknowledging the complexity and unknowns.
The longer-term effects of the pandemic on children remain insufficiently examined and discussed, with many believing this era is over. However, childhood experiences shape development in ways that can last a lifetime. The increase in mental health ‘disorders’ in young people since the pandemic might be better understood as developmentally shaped adaptive responses to this time, deserving of compassion, support and, ultimately evidence that a paradigm shift away from neoliberalism is needed. Much mainstream post-pandemic research, i.e. research published in academic journals (which is often limited by funding bodies and research parameters) that explores childhood ‘disorders’ conclude with calls for more mental health services that involve mostly psychological or pharmacological treatment. Such research is generally limited in its ability to explore or challenge the deeper causes of the issues they are discussing. Psychological support is useful because how children make sense of their experiences will impact their mental wellbeing, and thus much healing and understanding can occur through psychological therapies. However, discussions around mental health can become propagandistic in themselves if they view mental distress as individual crisis rather than as a reaction to unmet needs derived from a dysfunctional culture. Under these circumstances, ‘treatment’ is often concerned with adapting to or accepting neoliberalism. This overlooks the root cause of the distress and reduces the opportunity to address where change is truly needed. There needs to be a clear framing that the ‘problem’ lies in the factors occurring in the child’s life, where nested care has not been available or sufficient, leading to unmet needs that create the young person’s distress or response/adaptation. Beyond that, the problem lies in government priorities, policies, and propaganda fuelled by authoritarian and economically prioritised narratives that create and normalise harmful childcare practices antithetical to nested care.
- UNICEF UK, “A Future for the World’s Children? A WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission,” accessed April 16, 2026, https://www.unicef.org.uk/helen-clark-awa-coll-seck-health/.
- Allan N. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, (1994, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates); Jack P. Shonkoff and Deborah A. Phillips, (eds.), From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development, (2000, Washington, DC: National Academy Press).
- Darcia Narvaez, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom (2014, New York: W. W. Norton & Company).
- Jennifer A. Campbell, Rebekah J. Walker, and Leonard E. Egede, “Associations Between Adverse Childhood Experiences, High-Risk Behaviors, and Morbidity in Adulthood,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 50, no. 3 (2016): 344–52, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2015.07.022.
- Darcia Narvaez, “Evolution, Childhood, and the Moral Self”, chapter in, Richard Gipps and Michael Lacewing, (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, (2018, Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp 637–659.
- Darcia Narvaez, Returning to the Core of Societal Health and Human Potential: Mothering and Nested Care, (27 November 2020, Maternal Gift Economy: Breaking Through (Virtual Conference)).
- Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, (2022, New York: Avery/Penguin Random House).
- Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, (2012,New York: Guilford Press).
- Jack P. Shonkoff et al. “Neuroscience, Molecular Biology, and the Childhood Roots of Health Disparities.” Journal of the American Medical Association, (2009), 301(21), pp 2252–2259.
(Featured Image: “Face Mask” by Candace McDaniel is marked with CC0 1.0.)
