The Blog

2020-

2020-12-03 d
THE COVID-CON III
What should happen to all evil tyrants who are hurting so many children with unnecessary lockdowns? "... (I)t would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."

Children of Quarantine What does a year of isolation and anxiety do to a developing brain?

Starting on April 6, a bearded and earnest neuroscientist at the University of Oregon named Philip Fisher began to send a digital questionnaire — at first weekly, and then, beginning in August, biweekly — to a representative group of a thousand American families with young children. He’s curious about how they and their kids are doing. They aren’t doing so well.

At first, writing into blank spaces on the questionnaire as if they were diaries, parents conveyed a fresh sense of surprise at their new reality. They observed their kids’ sudden regressions and general nervousness as novelties. Toilet-trained children were wetting their beds, and kids who once went to sleep easily became hard to soothe, waking at night or crawling in with their parents. “My son is suddenly scared of everything,” one Ohio parent wrote in the first week of June. An Arizona parent corroborated: “Our 2-year-old has had a very sudden increase in separation anxiety. She doesn’t like it when we leave the room, and at night she takes a long time to fall asleep because she doesn’t want us to go.”

By summer, the cabin fever and separation from friends, as well as the disruption of routine, were taking a toll. At week 12, 79 percent of parents of kids under 5 said their children were more fussy and defiant than before, and 41 percent of their children were more fearful or anxious. Harried parents reported frequent tantrums and incessant, escalating sibling fights. One young boy in New York mourned the loss of his day care, shuttered for more than two months, and chanted the name of each child in his class every night in an incantation of grief. Just after the Fourth of July, a mother in Missouri noted that her daughter had gotten more demanding, wanting extra attention especially when she was on video calls. That same week, a young mother in Pennsylvania worried that four months of isolation had been “devastating” to her daughter’s mental health. “She really needs to get back in counseling, but we’re concerned about exposure.”

The trend lines showed an interesting pattern. Until the first week of August, fear and anxiety toggled up and down but always hovered around 40 percent of responses, like a fever that’s stable but just won’t break. But by late summer, that line became jagged, spiking up to about 53 percent in the third week of August, then sinking to 36 percent in early October, only to rise again to 50 percent the following week. Meanwhile, the number of kids who were fussy or defiant never fell below 70 percent. “Our 6-month-old cries the entire day. The entire day,” wrote one late-30s mother in Ohio in the middle of August. “Every moment she’s awake, she scream-cries. She cries so much her voice is hoarse. She gave herself a bloody nose yesterday. So our 4.5-year-old is reasonably distressed and just hangs out in the basement or hides in our home ‘office’ with his earphones on.” As school started, the bed-wetting continued. Children who had mature vocabularies regressed to baby talk. And then fall came with its catastrophes. “Now the fires are going, and we really can’t go out,” wrote one mother in California. “I wonder how this affects my baby’s development.”

In mid-November, New York City schools closed down again, after two months of ill-attended in-person instruction. Across California, where San Francisco and Los Angeles hadn’t even tried to open their schools, a new wave of shelter-in-place guidelines were announced. New records were set, nationally, for coronavirus cases and hospitalizations, and across the country, parents who had let themselves breathe a little bit during the summer and early fall found themselves staring down a grim, bunkered winter — this global experiment in child psychology lasting perhaps another six months. The returns so far are distressing. A recent study in JAMA Pediatrics found that in Hubei province, where COVID-19 raged during the winter months of 2020, school-age children who quarantined for just 30 days reported measurably more depression and anxiety than similar pre-pandemic cohorts. A small Harvard study on the effects of the pandemic has found that caregiver-reported depression, anxiety, and misbehavior among American kids in the general population to have reached levels typically seen only in those previously diagnosed with a form of mental disorder. According to a literature review out of the University of Bath, persistent loneliness and isolation among children of the kind that has become quite widespread during the pandemic can lead to suicidal ideation and self-harm and to significant depression. “The kids will carry these experiences through life,” Fisher told me. “And it’s not going to be good.”

... As struggles continue, the effects deepen. Toxic stress is a cumulative condition, and it does not discriminate. A landmark study conducted between 1995 and 1997 by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente found that the more adverse experiences children have in life — violence at home, suicidal or mentally ill family members, instability owing to family separation — the likelier they are to suffer from severe developmental and health problems, including disrupted neuro-development; social, emotional, and cognitive impairment; and early death. And though more affluent parents can afford to buy themselves more bandwidth — a country house, a nanny, a pod — their children are not immune. Mental illness, substance abuse, and the stresses of solo parenting afflict their families too.

As with the scale of the pandemic itself, the numbers of those suffering secondary consequences are almost too large to grasp. There are 74 million kids under 18 in the U.S., which is to say more children in America than there are Trump voters, a greater number than the population of France. And the collective shrug of big business, policy-makers, and government with regard to the fates of these children amounts to wholesale abandonment. (“I’m kind of discouraged, frankly, right now,” Senator John Cornyn said weakly of the congressional impasse holding up additional relief funds.) In September, Fisher’s research showed that 60 percent of Black, Latinx, and single-parent families were facing at least one material hardship: difficulty paying for rent, food, utilities, or health care. It also showed that 40 percent of all American families were facing these hardships. “There’s an erosion of well-being that’s directly tied to money and the ability to pay for basic needs,” Fisher said. “There’s no reason to think people are going to be able to engage in nurturing ways with their kids when they’re worrying about food. This is a perfect storm of toxic stress. With what we know about how vulnerable kids are to stress early in life, it’s just shocking to me the way that it’s all adding up. We’re all going over the edge together.” (read more)

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