In the conversations around reopening schools and safety, we’ve heard over and over from government officials and teachers unions that remote learning is the only “safe” option. But with discussions about safety, officials are taking a myopic approach to what constitutes safe and unsafe, and what unintended health consequences come from keeping kids locked at home, tied to screens.
My friend in New Jersey told me a disturbing story about her first grade son’s emotional state that has stuck with me for weeks. She explained, “He has started asking fairly regularly if we live in a computer, if we’re real, and if we are cartoons.”
It’s not just her young son exhibiting distress related to the isolation, her seventh grade daughter is feeling the same. She explained:
These are two anecdotes of two kids in a middle-class, two-parent family where neither parent has experienced job loss or ill health resulting from the pandemic. These are two children in an ideal circumstance, and yet, they are sinking under the weight of the last 5 months. And they aren’t alone. HuffPost reports:
Of roughly 1,500 teenagers who took part in the survey, conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of the National 4-H Council in May, 7 out of 10 teenagers said they were struggling with their mental health in some way.
More than half said they’d experienced anxiety, 45% said they’d felt excess stress, and 43% identified that they’d struggled with depression.
For some context, roughly 12% of American teens meet diagnostic criteria for depression and roughly 30% generally meet criteria for having an anxiety disorder by the time they are 18, although that data is by no means identical.
“It is clear to us based on the survey findings that COVID-19 has had a measurable adverse impact on teens’ mental health,” Jennifer Sirangelo, president and CEO of 4-H, told HuffPost. “For example, 61% of teens said that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased their feelings of loneliness.”
During the formative years for young kids and teens, we’re putting them in front of the one thing we know has the most deep and negative influence on their mental health: screens. Another friend with a 16-year-old niece battling severe depression that has worsened considerably over the course of the lockdowns told me, “All social opportunity was taken away except for social media.”
Health officials are, justifiably, concerned about the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic on children and teens — but related to suicide and drug overdoses, not the actual virus itself. CDC Director Robert Redfield recently explained: “There has been another cost that we’ve seen, particularly in high schools. We’re seeing sadly far greater suicides than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose, that are above excess … then we are deaths from COVID.”
The situation for America’s youth is dire. While we’re risking reopening restaurants and malls, the most at-risk of our population, our children, remain locked inside for the foreseeable future. There is no metric for when it will be deemed “safe” to go back to school. Is it when the virus has disappeared completely? That is an impossible standard. As we consider their return to the classroom, it’s imperative we consider the mental health toll that recent months have taken and work to reverse the negative trends caused by public health policy for a virus they have been at a negligible risk of in the first place.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a stay-at-home and homeschooling mother of four and a freelance writer. She is an editor at Ricochet.com, a columnist at the Forward, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
