Where do the children play?

One thing not mentioned is the effect of Covid and lockdowns.

On the one hand, my youngest was just getting into gaming with friends when the first lockdown started. I will be forever grateful that he did as his social life hardly seemed to suffer and he just carried on playing online, shouting and yelling with them just as much as if he was outside at a playground.

My teenage daughters had a much harder time of it though, as neither were into gaming and lost a lot of treasured contact with friends. Both suffered poor exam results as a result and have struggled to stay in touch with friends since.

The other aspect is those babies and toddlers who grew up in lockdown with no peer interaction at all. AIUI, they are still having a terrible time adjusting to school and normal social interaction.

I don't know how folks did it elsewhere, or what the rules was.

Here, a friend and I created ourselves a "bubble". My family and his family hanged out with each other. My kid was playing with his kid. We went on long forest walks, with the kids, and they could roam and play.

We didn't have contacts with lots of others, and if we did, we stayed away from each other for ~4 days or so, until we shared the same social bubble again.

Worked wonderfully well.

As another data point, my son was 5 when the lockdowns hit and missed the end of his kindergarten year and the entirety of first grade. He's doing fine.

My daughter was 18 months and went back to preschool at age three. She's also doing fine.

In fact I don't know any of their peer group who I would consider to be "having a terrible time adjusting to school and normal social interaction" which could be directly tied to Covid. There were some kids who had already been identified as having developmental challenges, and that hasn't changed.