MY kids were among the lucky ones this week.
It was as if their lottery numbers came up as their respective age groups were freed from home detention and allowed to return to school.
Why Preps to Grade 2 students were selected ahead of Grades 3 and 4 must come down to government health advice, I guess, but as parents it was wonderful to see them reunited with friends.
But the happiness we felt was not shared by many parents across Sunraysia.
I’m not sure how parents this week explained to their Grade 4 child that their Grade 2 brother or sister could go and see their friends at school but they couldn’t.
In school talk, it just sucks.
While no one envies governments in a pandemic, too often the rules and restrictions imposed on people’s lives have seemed cruel and confusing.
And the decision to send some kids to school and not others, leaving parents to deal with the emotional fallout in already stressed homes, was just one of them.
For starters, what is the logic?
If there happened to be virus circulating at a school, doesn’t it stand to reason that the same Grade 2 student who attended school would return to a family household with their elder siblings and parents anyway?
Parents would do anything to protect their children, never more so than during a pandemic, but is the fear our government has been driving about the risk the Delta variant poses to kids real or over-inflated?
There is strong evidence COVID-19 poses very little threat to children and that the Delta variant does not do much to increase that risk.
“The evidence shows, to the best of our knowledge to date, COVID-19 – even with Delta – remains a mild illness for children,” said Royal Australasian College of Physicians president-elect and paediatrician Dr Jacqueline Small.
And then there was this from Robert Booy, professor of child health at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead: “There is an unworldly response to a small risk in children, which has been horribly, horribly overinflated,” he said.
As parents, we take risk assessments with our children very seriously.
If parents do not want to send their children to school to avoid the risk of catching a virus, then they are entitled to do that.
I read recently that science does not set policy – that’s up to us, as members of society – and good policy needs to take into account all the evidence, not just the bit that is most scary.
There’s also evidence from the UK that kids are at greater risk of catching COVID-19 if they are at home than if they go to school.
Perhaps the government’s main argument is that stopping school is not about preventing kids from getting infected, but instead stopping parents from moving around – picking them up and dropping them off.
But at this point of the pandemic, with so much mixed messaging, who would know?
Under the Victorian Government’s latest easing of restrictions, 600 people are again allowed to stroll around Bunnings, but only 10 people are allowed inside for seated service in hospitality venues, no matter how big the room. Little wonder we all scratch our heads trying to make sense of it all.
Kids, parents and teachers have done an amazing job over the past 18 months to move learning online.
But I’ve always felt a huge part of learning and development for children is the natural interaction that occurs inside classrooms and outside in the playground.
Kids spending too much time in front of screens is not healthy for anyone.
It was a thrill to see our own kids so happy as they ran into school on Friday.
But let’s hope, for the start of Term 4, all kids and parents across Sunraysia can share that joy.
