Anyone else find it strange that a country that has often fallen in line with "think of the children" arguments for hypothetical dangers appears to be completely uncaring about very real dangers of social isolation that are impacting our youth?
So if I'm reading this right, Reuters sent survey's to an unknown number of school districts. Of those sent, 74 replied, and of those 55 answered "yes, we saw an increase in this metric" to at least two questions on the survey.<p>How many would answer yes to at least two in most years? How many schools saw a decrease in metrics? And how many surveys weren't completed, as a district having issues seems more likely to respond?<p>I don't doubt there have been issues, but without the full survey details I don't trust any of this article's conclusions.
It is really nothing particular about schools. In Spain the first day schools were closed children started playing on the streets, or playing basketball and soccer(you can play soccer anywhere). They were quite happy doing that.<p>Then the authorities said: No, no no! Kids must stay in house all day, closed all public spaces, something contranature for kids.<p>It was the get "in house", secluded, don't do anything socially. Too many don'ts with no does.<p>I can stay indoors playing guitar or piano. Reading books,or HN, or cooking. Even then I need to get out from time to time. It is not realistic to expect children doing the same.<p>Most of those activities were not really dangerous with some restrictions.<p>You can go in a bus or car with mask if people don't talk and introduce air from the outside.<p>You can play different basketball or football games with little risk. You can jump rope. But bureaucrats decided they were little monks. They are not.<p>School is not the necessary thing here. It is playing socially and exercising what children need like water and air.
This is really unfortunate second order effect of lockdowns. You see the SAT scores go down as well and some groups don't want to admit the negative effects of in a shift to in home learning, especially among the most vulnerable groups. And we're not even honest about it and just retreat to the idea of getting rid of standardized tests altogether to mask over the achievement gap.
The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill. Was it justified given uncertainty (i.e. prepare for the p90 or p95 outcome)? Possibly. But what I saw from the leadership class the last year was a complete disregard for the concerns of the little people and their livelihoods. Once things got politicized re: Trump, the most polarizing american political figure of my lifetime, it became even worse in multiple directions.<p>Very few people come out looking good in this, except the scientists and regulators who pushed the vaccine forward.
I am neither in the U.S. nor a student, not even an extrovert - and I still feel the effects of our local lockdown on my mental stability. So does my wife, who is usually more resilient than I am.<p>This will have a lot of subtle consequences down the line.
What would it have been like if the schools had not been closed?
If millions had been infected in a short time and the hospitals had been overloaded so that in addition to the deaths from Corona, the deaths from lack of capacity would have been added?
How traumatic would that be for the children?
Are there any studies on this from New York or Italy?
Can the consequences of the lockdown be so cleanly separated from the consequences of the pandemic?
Couldn't it also be that the lockdown simply makes people more aware of the threat of the pandemic because it has a tangible impact on their personal lives?
It's nice that schools that follow the hygiene rules have fewer COVID cases, but what percentage of schools have the space for it and actually implement it?
Why else have studies shown that school closures are one of the top 3 measures against the spread of infection, after closing down restaurants and limiting contacts to 5 people?
I live in a part of North America that kept its schools open during most of the pandemic. Children are learning and playing together. The games they play are pretty much the games they would have played a bit over a year ago. The adults in their lives don't transfer the stress that they are feeling to children whenever two kids get the urge to hug each other. It is almost as though the pandemic does not exist.<p>For the most part, it does not exist in our small corner of the continent because adults behaved responsibly. This means that most of the measures we take happen behind the scenes: the children have a few more rules to comply with, adults calmly correct them when those rules are broken, and (most important) the focus is on teaching them good habits and sheltering them from the burden of the emotional stresses of this exceptional time.<p>If we have another outbreak, I am all for shutting down the schools as a part of a swift and hopefully short response. Just as keeping children home for months on end is not good for their mental health, exposing them to a twisted version of the classroom environment for an extended period of time is not good for their mental health.
On the other side, 10 million kids may never go back to school in the developing countries after pandemic. Probably good for the underground textile shops dressing up the ones who can work from home.<p><a href="https://www.savethechildren.net/news/almost-10-million-children-may-never-return-school-following-covid-19-lockdown" rel="nofollow">https://www.savethechildren.net/news/almost-10-million-child...</a>
Disclaimer: I am not a parent.<p>Recalling back to my student days, I and my friends would be ecstatic about not going to school for whatever reason. Granted, the most extended no-school period would be the 3 months of summer break. I don't recall any kid ever actually wanting to go to school.<p>Maybe I'm thinking of this all wrong, but I feel it kind of hard to believe kids aren't liking not having to go to school.<p>Did school suddenly turn into a utopia of fun and excitement since the decade+ I was last in a classroom?<p>What I can believe though, is that some kids might be having a hard time not meeting and playing with their friends. But only a small handful of parents seem to be forbidding their kids from doing so anyways, so this still doesn't compute for me.
How much of this is caused by remote learning? Kids tend to spend long periods out of school with no ill effects during holidays. They even do a lot of homework without a severe mental health crisis (we presume). The difference could be that they have control over their time. The remote learning experience seems to be needlessly regimented. My own children have repurposed tools for remote learning to keep in touch with their friends: they probably socialize more now than they did pre-pandemic.<p><i>He would scream and cry multiple times per hour on Zoom,” she said. “It was all really scary and not in keeping with his personality.</i><p>The fact that children are being tethered to Zoom for hours in regimented routines is really disturbing. Adults can push back, kids don’t have the authority to do so. Our boss tried a group “good morning” routine as a sly way to do a roll-call when we went remote-first, but a limited number of people took the bait, and she quickly learned to trust us.
My eldest started kindergarten this year at our local parochial school. We’re so happy they did “in-person”. It was a great success<p>Effect on my kid:<p>1. My kid was getting really weird by the end o August, after not seeing other peers since March. Her mental well being changed completely.<p>2. English is not her native tongue, and KG have her a great opportunity to catch up before starting 1st. grade<p>The role of the school:<p>1. The school has had three cases of COVID all year (k-Gr8. Maybe about 320 kids?). There was no spread of COVID to others.<p>2. The school implemented a strict regiment to ensure safety. They had strict rules, and trusted the parents to respect them.<p>3. Only once were we asked to go “online” for two weeks because one of the three cases was a faculty member that worked in our class. That person had gottenCOVID elsewhere and was quickly identified due to periodic testing.<p>4. Parents were (are) offered virtual learning. No one I know took it except a women who gave birth in January; she pulled her kid once the baby was born.<p>Overall the gratitude my family has of our parochial school is immense. Tuition is very cheap (much cheaper than day care), and it’d be free if we couldn’t afford it.
I'm not a child (uni student) but I've spent the last year sitting at a computer in my childhood bedroom for 14 hours a day and I'm fucking miserable. My life feels fake since nothing I'm working towards exists in the offline world.
I'm rather against the lockdowns, shutting of schools and businesses or gathering. As adults we should be able to judge correctly based on real data. I think people just lost touch with what makes them human. They should never have agreed to any of this for the mild security they gained. I can go into detail why but it won't convince anyone. You have to look yourself.
The sun is shining, the vaccines are flowing, I can eat inside now, I am feeling optimistic today.<p>But on my grey days: I wonder how long the mental health trauma of all this will last. Besides school-age depression, there was a noticeable uptick in drug overdoses. (<a href="https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/16/as-pandemic-ushered-in-isolation-financial-hardship-overdose-deaths-reached-new-heights/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/16/as-pandemic-ushered-in-i...</a>) And, anecdotally, I have several friends and acquaintances who developed severe drug issues during the various stages of lockdown. I fear there’s going to be a lot of dark matter out there, and we won’t detect it until we see the knock-on effects for years down the road.<p>This is not an anti-lockdown screed, I feel like I must say. My dad went into the ICU for something non-COVID in December, and the hospitals then were at the breaking point. <i>(At least where I was.)</i> We needed to control this virus somehow. But we will be feeling this for a long time to come.
Strong support for rapid testing could have gotten schools open much sooner and probably prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths.<p>But unfortunately this was largely overlooked by the general public, and the cheapest tests that could do the most good are still not approved by the FDA.<p><a href="https://www.rapidtests.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rapidtests.org/</a>
That was the reason I decided to go in debt to pay for private schools.<p>Not only my kid was able to go to real live class but was more social and not isolated.<p>Is it worth it?<p>Well I have 40K in Debt.<p>My values are that it is worth.<p>Now working 2-3 jobs to pay it all.
I work in education, I'm also in school and was in school. My educator cohort has uniformly spoken about the retention issues their students have had, it seems shutdowns seriously retarded the academic growth of their students. I can corroborate that, myself: I was forced to leave my studies, and elected to take the fall off, hoping for a return to normalcy in the Spring of '21 - this was done both to ensure that work and school wouldn't conflict, and that I could observe the normal curriculum instead of a haphazard entree of online learning and recorded lectures and sans the labs that I'm paying extra money to participate in.<p>Having returned, things aren't back to "normal", one of my professors elected to use recorded lectures which don't have the same quality as in-person lectures. Not to mention it tries my attention sitting at a computer. I had the same class previously, and returned good grades up to the lockdown, I'm now a C student in the class where I was before an A student.<p>Mathematical concepts have almost entirely slipped. I seem to have forgotten all of my previous training, even simple processes like factoring were lost. I was an B student in the previous class, and had a reasonably solid grasp on the concepts, which we reviewed this year, and I found myself almost entirely lacking. I'm now a struggling C student and whats worse is the constant battery of assessment is actually doing more harm than good, requiring me to hamfistedly smash through chapters without ever studying the subject to develop understanding.
Sample size of 2 children (my 9 year old and 14 year old): neither want to go back to in-person school. In-person school can create its own set of mental health issues. My 14 year old socializes on her phone. The 9 year old is a type 1 diabetic and out of an abundance of caution we pulled him out a month before the school system decided to go remote learning last year. He loathes going back. Neither of my kids are antisocial, but they prefer not dealing with social drama that pervades school.<p>I don't think my kids have had their growth stunted because of our isolation. Quite the contrary, the 14 year old has had time to mature away from school without the influences of less-than-ideal schoolmates. On the other hand, they've had to learn to learn by themselves sometimes when they're stuck and can't get help (and can't wait for us to finish working.) Learning to help oneself is more valuable than anything I ever learned at school.<p>Our 9 year old will probably be homeschooled through June '22 because his age bracket won't be able to get a Covid-19 vaccine until early 2022. He's already asking if we can homeschool him beyond that.<p>It's not all black and white and there is no one-size fits all.
It is what it is. We all made sacrifices during the pandemic. This had to happen in order to save lives. The only thing that matters is what we do going forward.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg too. A quick summary of the lockdown harms:<p>missed hospital visits for heart attacks and cancer screening, cancelled childhood vaccinations, school closures, child and spousal abuse, kids growing up without seeing facial expressions on others, pain from postponed elective (including dental) procedures, food shortages in the third world (and even in developed countries), the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in the US, massive economic damage, closed gyms and sports, suicide & mental illness
Not only mental health, but things like basic nutrition, hygiene, and medical care, as well.<p>Many school districts recognized this and offered free meals, healthcare and other services throughout the pandemic. But this still requires parents motivated enough to take their kids by a meal pick-up site.<p>Working with some of these parents throughout the pandemic, some of them (mostly dads) did not know the correct spelling of their child's first name and/or did not know their child's birthday. This wasn't one or two people, this was many.<p>Except for those who put in the work, such handing out meals or providing medical care for essentially free, "Think of the children" is largely a lie in America.
Neither a parent nor an epidemiologist, so I'm going to stay out of the discussion of whether or not various lockdowns were worth it, but<p>> Of the 74 districts that responded, 74% reported multiple indicators of increased mental health stresses among students. More than half reported rises in mental health referrals and counseling.<p>Hasn't this been a trend for years pre-covid anyways? It will probably take many years to get reliable conclusions on how 2020-2021 actually affected the trajectory of young people, and I'm not convinced either way as of yet.
An interesting development - students in LA object to returning to school buildings for the sake of being physically present <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdNO2pWrKD7IY9zPi2HI66lmK1ycTXujHL-FnT3t1PfQIVYYw/viewform" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdNO2pWrKD7IY9zPi2H...</a>
This sucks. Parents are setup for failure with demanding jobs and low wages. They need more time with children. Public school used to be small classes... now they are basically useless and do more harm than good for the majority.<p>Things are going to get worse unless there is a huge reversal with education, nutrition and the idea of success in life.
This article doesn't even attempt to show differences between mental health effects in school districts with in-person school vs those that stayed in person. It might as well be an opinion piece.
Lockdowns after the first month fail any and all cost-benefit analyses.<p>I'm not making political claims or favouring any political causes or parties - but the tremendous costs simply cannot be justified any longer now that they are clearer, and the "at risk" populations are much clearer.<p>Side note: even if you take public choice theory seriously and bake in the assumption that lockdowns will continue to happen despite being devastatingly costly, then the onus becomes vaccination - there is no reason not to approve AstraZeneca's vaccine this instant and roll it out into every arm you can find ASAP, starting with the elderly and the obese.<p>Even if the blood clot thing was real (which is appears not to be), you lose more people to covid than the supposed blood clots.<p>Roll them out, yesterday.<p>PPS: Every major Western country is doing wacky things on this topic, so don't take my comment as commentary on any given country (except re: approval of the AZ vaccine, which is a commentary directly on the FDA of the US).
There is an interesting article about how race affects the decision to go back to school.<p><a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/why-black-parents-arent-joining-the-push-to-reopen-schools/" rel="nofollow">https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/why-black-paren...</a>