On Friday, Time magazine made the utterly boring choice of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as its “Person [technically People] of the Year.” But as far as I’m concerned, the people of the year in 2020 were the children.
I know, it sounds cheesy, but hear me out.
The year 2020 was an absolutely devastating one for the United States, with a death toll that is now exceeding 9/11 on a daily basis. The year has also brought many heroes, including the front-line medical workers and the scientists responsible for the incredibly quick development of vaccines that should hopefully save hundreds of thousands of lives and get us back to normal by this time next year.
But no group in America has been forced to make more dramatic sacrifices to their lives relative to the actual health risk to themselves than our children. So far, there have been 92 coronavirus deaths 14 and under out of over 60 million people, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s a ratio of about 1.5 deaths out of a million.
Yet, in many parts of the country, children have been forced to give up so many of the things that brought them joy. They have been kept from grandparents; they have been prevented from seeing their friends; they have missed out on Little League and other team sports; they have been prevented from going into indoor playspaces and even sometimes blocked from going to outdoor playgrounds; they weren’t able to use public pools in the summer; they haven’t been able to go to birthday parties or have their own; they have either been prevented from going to school or have had to sit through classes wearing masks all day.
And that describes the more lucky of them, the ones living in economically and socially stable families. For those living in poverty or in dysfunctional families, school is their only outlet to be children and to have responsible supervision. Though there have been reports suggesting a huge spike in child abuse during the pandemic, the truth is, we may never know because, without teachers and other social workers who are able to monitor children outside of the home independently for signs of abuse, many such cases will be unreported.
There are two other aspects of the pandemic that I believe have been especially unfair to children.
One is that they have had no sense of agency. Even with all the lockdown rules in place, adults have had some leeway to decide how strict they are going to be in following COVID-19 protocols. Even heroic medical workers, at some point, decided to pick that profession. But children have had all sorts of decisions thrust upon them without any say in the process.
The other factor to consider is the extent to which time accelerates as we get older. Try to think back to how long the five-year period between kindergarten and fifth grade seemed at the time. Then, compare it to the 22-27-year-old stage of your life, or 37-42, or 51-56. It’s pretty clear that human perception of time goes more quickly the more years we have behind us. A child who is 4 probably has limited memories of what life was like before the pandemic hit, and even for older children, what seems like a bad year for adults probably feels like an eternity.
What we did to children this year fills me with a mix of sadness and anger. They were forced to give up pretty much everything they knew for a disease that they would likely not even notice even if they got it.
