I don't understand - are you implying that the act of deciding to have a long lockdown necessitates that the decision makers do not care about children, or are there specifics you are leaving unsaid?
I do get this impression from watching interviews with some of the public-health experts advising governments. As an academic, I can recognize my fellow academics who are obsessively focused on their own field and passionate about it, but they might not realize that people outside the field don’t have the same investment. For some of these public-health experts, reducing transmission to zero and avoiding every potential death is paramount, and the societal and political consequences are only at the margins of their consciousness at best. However, the general public is broadly ready to accept some level of morbidity and disease spread in order to live with fewer restrictions, there is only a debate about how much.
You don't have to, it is common sense. Would a country be willing to go into social distancing, schools and restaurants closed, etc. in order to save one elderly person somewhere? Of course not. How about two? That is where the debate starts, but that debate is foreign to people (whether public-health academics interested in pushing numbers to zero, or health ministers whose job performance is judged only on looking proactive) whose main concern is avoiding death.
Even in a representative democracy you don't have to expect leaders to trust the experts if those experts go beyond the pale. Among the scientific advisors to governments, a handful have suggested maintaining strict social distancing and masks even after COVID to have a shot at eradicating flu, etc., and from an expert public-health viewpoint they may be perfectly right, but would the public expect their elected officials to heed that advice?
Not quite... I'm referring to the fact that society has often gotten quite worked up over "think of the children" arguments for perceived dangers, but when faced with a real threat to child welfare, the response has been rather mild in comparison.
It already worked fine during the first lockdown last year. At the end we were down to numbers at which tracing contacts and quarantining them worked quite fine for a while. This would have been an acceptable level where people would have been able to do quite a lot of things but not everything. A lot of people overdid it though. Parties, weddings, ... if nothing had ever happened. Unfortunately the response was slow and weak. Now we still deal with the consequences.
How can you measure the effectiveness of “quite a lot of things” over “everything?”
You might advocate for Germany closing its borders earlier and for longer, and forcing police registration of fellow Europeans, but personally I think that is horrible. I see restrictions on free movement in Schengen and challenges to European integration as much more of a problem in the long term than COVID morbidity.