‘My son cowers when a shopkeeper says hello’ – are the toddlers of Covid all right?

Until the spring of 2020, Rebecca Handford’s then two-year-old daughter Eadie was happily spending three days a week being looked after by her grandparents, enjoying trips out, and going to cafes.

But then came the first lockdown, and her world closed in overnight. The family, who live in a small village on the border between Cheshire and Derbyshire, felt lucky to have a garden for Eadie to play in – although, as Handford ruefully puts it, while she was trying to work from home “Mr Tumble did a lot of the heavy lifting”.

Eadie is an only child, and her language came on in leaps and bounds due to spending so much time with her parents. But Handford worries that she missed out on learning to socialise. “If there’s a little gang of toddlers running around, she very much doesn’t want to take part. Even if we go to the park, if there’s another child on the slide she will go and play somewhere else until it’s free.”