I agree - this never really occurred to me either. My girlfriend's mother is a preschool teacher who just had to go back to in-person sessions and she believes some of these kids will have trauma's from being young and terrified. One little girl is afraid to touch anything and constantly asks if objects have been cleaned/safe to touch? it's heartbreaking to her.
Sounds like a bunch of children just got trained to have obsessive compulsive disorder. My wife has it and my life was filled with contamination fears before COVID-19.
As someone who used to struggle with OCD in my youth: Procedural awareness of sterile field and infection control is a very different thing from OCD. OCD can't really be taught like that.
I really struggled with this with my toddler. In the end I decided to chill out and take whatever comes as a consequence rather than traumatise my child for life.
Typically kids are more resilient then that. The kid that ends up as scared had those tendencies before. If your toddler don't tend to be paranoid, you taking precautions and talking about them as normal thing to do won't harm him at all.
