THOSE at TCW sounded the alarm early. While the nation was gripped by fear and the government embarked on an unprecedented experiment in social control, TCW warned of the long-term consequences of locking down a healthy society. TCW writers forecast the economic ruin, the erosion of civil liberties, and the catastrophic impact on our children’s education and social fabric. Now, as the political class moves on, the evidence of that damage is staring us in the face in a profoundly troubling way: a generation of young people seemingly devoid of the resilience required to navigate adult life.
The latest unemployment figures, particularly for the 16-24 age bracket, are not merely a statistic: they are a damning indictment of lockdown policy. In April to June 2025, there were 948,000 people aged 16 to 24 who were not in employment, education or training (NEET), 12.8 per cent of the age group. Employers increasingly report young applicants lacking in basic interpersonal skills, unable to handle minor criticism, and paralysed by the normal anxieties of a workplace. This isn’t a coincidence. It is the direct harvest of a policy which stripped teenagers of the experiences that build character. We didn’t just lock them in their homes; we locked them out of the essential curriculum of life.
To understand the mechanics of this failure, one need only turn to a remarkable new book that feels almost prophetic in its timing: Dr Sujata Kelkar Shetty’s Resilience Decoded, published by Penguin Random House. While not a political tract, its scientific insights into the adolescent mind expose the profound folly of our covid response. Dr Kelkar Shetty, a biological scientist trained under stress research legend George Chrousos at the National Institutes of Health in the US, provides the biological blueprint for how teen resilience is built – and, by tragic extension, how it was dismantled.
At the heart of her thesis is a powerful metaphor for the teenage brain. She explains why teenagers combine ‘the cognitive horsepower of a Nobel laureate with the impulse control of a caffeinated squirrel’. This ‘Ferrari brain’ is all engine and faulty brakes, a neurological reality that is not a flaw but a feature of development. The prefrontal cortex, the seat of judgement, risk-assessment and emotional regulation, is under construction. And how is it built? Not through isolation and screen-based sedation, but through lived experience, social interaction, trial, error and consequence.
Lockdowns were a systematic attack on this developmental process. By confining adolescents to their bedrooms, replacing face-to-face chat with fragmented Zoom calls and abolishing the daily challenges of navigating the world alone, we denied them the essential data their brains needed to mature. Dr Kelkar Shetty’s revelation that teenage forgetfulness ‘isn’t personal – merely neurological’ is a lifesaver for parent-child relationships. But what happens when the entire world forgets the needs of its young? We created a laboratory experiment in stunting.
Consider the digital realm. While policymakers clutched their pearls about ‘screen time’, lockdowns made the smartphone the sole portal to the outside world. Dr Kelkar Shetty’s concept of a ‘digital sunset’ – making tech boundaries sound ‘less like draconian punishment and more like common sense wrapped in a duvet of self-care’ – became an impossibility when the digital world was the only world. We normalised a state of hyper-connection and profound isolation simultaneously, robbing young people of the quiet, unstructured boredom where self-reflection and internal resilience often grow.
Perhaps the most damaging legacy is the mindset we enforced. Dr Kelkar Shetty treats adolescence ‘not as a problem to be solved, but as a biological phase to be understood – a distinction that changes everything’. The lockdown regime did the precise opposite. It framed other human beings as a problem to be solved: a lethal threat. It taught young people that risk is to be eliminated entirely, not managed and learned from. It institutionalised a culture of safetyism that is the absolute antithesis of resilience. How can we expect a young person to handle the rejection of a job application when they were taught for two years that a hug from a grandparent was a potentially deadly act?
The author’s communication advice is another area where lockdowns did active harm. Her deceptively simple ‘listen first, fix later’ maxim cuts through modern parenting’s noise. She observes that ‘most teenage outbursts aren’t problems demanding solutions but emotions needing witnesses’. During the lockdown, the natural outlets for these emotions – a kickabout with friends, the whispered confidences in a school corridor, the simple act of leaving a tense home environment – were outlawed. Emotions were bottled up with no witness but the same stressed family members or, worse, channelled into the performative, often cruel, arena of social media.
Dr Kelkar Shetty writes that she ‘transforms teenage mistakes from crimes requiring punishment into experiments yielding data’. This is the very essence of building resilience. Yet during the lockdowns, minor infractions of arbitrary rules were treated not as learning opportunities but as moral transgressions. The state positioned itself as the punitive parent, punishing the ‘crime’ of sitting on a park bench or meeting a friend. We taught a generation that mistakes are not learning data, but sins to be penalised. Is it any wonder they now fear to step into the arena of employment, where mistake and learning are inextricably linked?
Our government, in its blind panic, chose to inoculate against a virus at the expense of inoculating a generation against life itself. They were denied the stumbles, the scraped knees, the awkward conversations, the missed buses, the failed tests – all the micro-doses of adversity that build the psychological immune system.
The consequence is now visible in job centres up and down the country. The young unemployed are not lazy or feckless; they are, in many cases, the lockdown injured. They are suffering from a resilience deficit engineered by short-sighted policy. As Dr Kelkar Shetty proves, resilience isn’t ‘some mysterious birthright of the emotionally gifted, but rather the ordinary magic that happens when science meets compassion at the kitchen table’. For two years, we replaced that ordinary magic with the cold, hard logic of state control. We must now face the cost, and begin the difficult work of rebuilding what we so carelessly tore down.
