The six-year-old lost the first day of real school. The 12-year-old lost the team, the rhythm of being expected somewhere. The 16-year-old lost the years when you begin to figure out who you are. The 18-year-old watched a graduation vanish.

They are everywhere. They are in your classroom, on your team, at your dinner table. You already know something is different about them. You just might not have had the words for it yet.

For nearly two years, the ordinary friction of growing up — the part that happens between children, in hallways and on frozen ponds and in the back seats of minivans — was taken away. The lockdowns kept children physically safe. But they removed something harder to measure: the steady, everyday experiences that teach a young person who they are becoming.

The damage was not abstract. In 2021, researchers at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, led by child psychiatrist Dr. Daphne Korczak, surveyed more than 1,000 Ontario families. More than 70 per cent of school-aged children showed deterioration in at least one area of mental health. The factor most strongly associated with that decline was not the virus. It was the stress of social isolation. A follow-up found that children’s mental health did not improve after they returned to in-person learning — and that participation in sports and activities had collapsed.

Separate research by Dr. Rose Scott, published in 2024, revealed something deeper. Children aged three to five tested after the lockdowns showed significantly worse ability to understand that other people hold different thoughts and feelings — a foundational skill that develops in the first years of life. Before the pandemic, 80 per cent of five-year-olds passed the key measure. Afterward, 63 per cent did. For children from lower-income families, 51 per cent.

In plain language: many of these children did not just fall behind in school. They fell behind in the basic ability to read other people. And they are still behind.

If you live in Kawartha Lakes, you did not need a study to tell you this. You saw the teenager who came out of lockdown quieter than she went in. You saw the child who used to run toward things and now waits to be asked.

The pandemic did not strike a generation at full strength. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues in The Anxious Generation, children’s mental health had already begun to deteriorate as a play-based childhood gave way to a phone-based one — less unsupervised play, more time on screens and social media. The lockdowns deepened a vulnerability that was already there.

But young people are built to recover — if the conditions around them allow it.

Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child and the SickKids team reached the same conclusion: the most common factor in a child’s resilience is at least one stable, committed relationship with a supportive adult — someone who shows up, knows their name, and notices when something is off. Dr. Korczak’s research pointed to school, recreation and extracurricular involvement as the factors most strongly associated with protecting children’s mental health.

Three things emerge from the research: a committed adult; structured activities alongside peers; and the repeated experience of belonging. In Kawartha Lakes, everyone already exists.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Kawartha Lakes–Haliburton matches mentors with young people who need a steady adult in their lives — and last year had to pause new applications for lack of volunteers. Minor hockey needs coaches. School breakfast programs need hands in the morning. None of it requires a credential. It requires someone willing to be there, doing something ordinary, beside a child who needs it.

They don’t need a diagnosis. They need what every young person has always needed — someone who keeps showing up.

In a dressing room in Lindsay, a 10-year-old pulls the laces tight on her own skates. She is slow. She is concentrating. The coach who has come every Saturday since September watches but does not reach over. Not today.

She finishes. She looks up. And for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t wait to be told she got it right.

That is where it starts. Not in a policy paper. Not in a program. It’s in the quiet moment when a child discovers that someone showed up — and that maybe, she was worth showing up for.