Pandemics can be indiscriminate, with viruses that make no difference between attacking patients and those who save. If you’re human, you will. COVID-19 was different, especially with regard to age. The disease showed a specific animadversion for the elderly, with the over 65 and considered as the greatest threat of hospitalization and death, and those under 18 years of age experience an appearance of epidemiological rupture. Although a small proportion of adolescents have suffered severe cases, the maximum number of those who develop the disease in this age cohort is more likely to have milder or no more null symptoms.
But if the COVID-19 saves the frame of maximum children, it’s not as kind in your mind. No one is immune to the tension of a pandemic and related quarantine. However, children would possibly be exposed. By living in a universe that is already out of their control, they can shake when the truths on which they depend to bring order to the global: the rituals of their lives, everyday life, are shattered.
“I’m afraid young children are going crazy,” says Ezra Golberstein, a fitness policy researcher at the University of Minnesota. “There is the disease itself and its fear. In the most sensible way of that, you have the locks, the young people around the school and their friends.” As summer approaches, many of the 12,000 camps in the United States have postponed or canceled their seasons altogether, leaving young people even more isolated. “Especially for young people predisposed to see the global in pessimistic terms, there will be more anxiety as they feel much more out of control,” says Mary Alvord, a Maryland-based child psychologist and co-author of the Resilience Child and Adolescent Construction Program. . “We hear young people say, “I am afraid for myself, for my parents. What if we get sick? »»
Now, as the next school year approaches, there is even more uncertainty. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published rules for schools, analyzing the threat of infection for 3 other scenarios: continuous distance learning (what they call the “lowest threat”); combine distance learning with face-to-face courses and social distance (“more threat”); and resume full-time assistance (“biggest threat”). That is, which states will decide which approaches, however, the large school systems in Los Angeles and San Diego have announced that they will begin the school year with remote learning alone, a resolution that means even more quarantine for 825,000 students. In fact, they probably wouldn’t be the only ones.
For now, there is a dearth of hard research on how the pandemic is affecting children’s mental health, mostly because the virus has been so fast-moving and studies take time. What data does exist is troubling. In one study out of China, published in JAMA Pediatrics, researchers in Hubei province, where the pandemic originated, examined a sample group of 2,330 schoolchildren for signs of emotional distress. The kids had been locked down for what, to quarantine-weary Americans, likely seems like a relatively short period–an average of 33.7 days. Even after that single month, 22.6% of them reported depressive symptoms and 18.9% were experiencing anxiety.
There’s also the other sick victim of the pandemic: the economy, which is still struggling. In a 2018 paper published in Health Economics, Golberstein and his co-authors studied economic situations in the United States from 2001 to 2013 and found that the Great Recession, a 5% increase in the national unemployment rate, correlated with a staggering 35% to 50% accumulated in “clinically significant fitness disorders in children.” With an unemployment rate now above 11%, compared to 3.6% in January, Golberstein expects to see more of the same emotional return. “When the economy is in a bad position, children’s intellectual fitness gets worse,” he says. “This time it will be much worse because it’s also a pandemic.”
Lisa Stanton lives in Houston with her husband and her 9-year-old fraternal twins. Both parents have housework and paintings (Stanton’s husband was able to return to paintings as an asset manager) and the youth returned from school. With their summer camp closed for the season, the youth remained confined to space and the domestic environment became … Hard.
“I see one hundred percent more behavioral challenges,” Stanton says. “My son, who has learning problems, has 3 attacks a day. With my daughter, the challenge has become an iPad addiction. She has a TikTok account and has created an [aka] of an older girl. We took the pill and there was hysteria. She told us, “I need to be on the shelf all the time because [when I am] I don’t feel so alone.”
Loneliness in confinement is not unusual in the youth separated from their friends. But not all young people will be emotionally affected by the pandemic in the same way, not even at all; COVID-19 will do them in other grades and in other ways. Roxane Cohen Silver, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, specializes in human responses to mass trauma and has studied the September 11 attacks in the United States and the 2006 and 2010 earthquakes in Indonesia and Chile, respectively. Although no one in any culture is doing well at a time of such a tragedy, Silver has discovered that the closer Americans are to a crisis, whether geographically or personally, the greater the impact. Residents of New York and Washington, D.C., had more reactions to September 11 than others further away from terrorist movements. Coronavirus moves other people more powerful than others in the same way.
“The effect on a child’s sense of safety depends on the extent to which the circle of relatives is affected,” Silver says. “If there is a loss or if the circle of relatives radically adjusts its economic consequences, this occasion would shape the worldview of children.”
But being able to avoid non-public loss is not the same as avoiding fear, and young people are well aware of the problem. “I have a grandmother and grandfather who are very old and can infect them and can die,” Houston’s 4-year-old Benjy Taksa said in a brief interview overseen by a mother with TIME. Lisa Taksa, Benjy’s mother, says her son doesn’t seem otherwise concerned about the pandemic and, as she does, discovers tactics to deal with it. “In his work, I’ll hear him say, ‘This bear goes to the museum and has to wear his mask,'” she says.
Another variable is whether a child has entered into seizures with pre-existing intellectual fitness disorders. In the United States, 7.1% of 3- to 17-year-olds have been diagnosed with anxiety, according to the CDC. Another 3.2% in the same age organization suffers from depression. Then there’s 7.4% with diagnosed behavioral disorders and 9.4% with ADHD. Silver discovered that, after 9/11, the point of misery for teenagers largely controlled whether or not they had a history of such conditions. Other experts expect this trend to repeat due to COVID-19.
“Children who fought before [the pandemic] are now at greater risk,” says psychologist Robin Gurwitch, a professor at Duke University Medical Center. “You have to be careful of young people who were already in an intellectual way; we want to make sure they’re not interrupted.”
Adults and young people in care with personal intellectual aptitude can zoom in or skypapating in their grooming sessions without interrupting the remedy. But some young people don’t get the chance. In an April editorial published in JAMA Pediatrics, Golberstein and his co-authors reported that, according to a 2014 knowledge research, 13.2% of teens gained some form of school intellectual fitness facilities in the last 12 months (a figure that is roughly the same today). His deepest knowledge research 2012-2015 showed that of all the academics who gained intellectual fitness facilities, 57% gained something at school, while 35% won all. With schools closed, the same goes for care. And, as things stand, there’s no guarantee that schools will reopen in the fall.
“I’m worried about what it does to the kids,” Golberstein says. “The extent to which they can access the care of intellectual aptitude is a challenge. There is a shortage of many years and it is worse with the closure of schools.”
Age can also be vital in how the pandemic emotionally affects young people. Very young people might not realize anything different, that their parents are not going to work, which would possibly seem positive. “For younger young people, being with their parents full-time is considered an advantage,” Silver says.
But those same young men have incredibly nervous antennae when it comes to reading the worried temperament of the elderly around them. The tension of the environment in a gated house where parents care, possibly argue and disinfect everything that does not move, does not go unnoticed among the young. “In very young children, you may find more inclination,” Gurwitch says. “Children will have more trouble sleeping. In young people who have been trained in cleaning, you can see regressions and accidents. It’s not, he adds, a recipe for comfort or joy.”
For schoolchildren and teens, being with parents is an inconvenience, and being with friends is everything. In the case of the pandemic, this essential socialization is out of the question. Silver argues that one of the things that helped Americans recover from 9/11 was a kind of wonderful cultural collecting, exactly what can’t happen now.
“People would meet and pass to their places of worship, and there were monuments,” she says. “For children, not being in combination with friends at a time when they need to spend time with them makes this occasion very different.”
If there is one thing that is certain about the effect of the pandemic on the young mind, it will not be avoided until the spread of COVID-19 is completed. For parents and other caregivers, this means mitigating the problem, not fully solving it. A vital step: remembering the media, especially tv news. Thomas Cooper, a professor of media ethics at Emerson College in Boston, sees a vital precedent for covering the 9/11 attacks, and that worries him. “During 9/11, we discovered that the prime-time policy of planes flying to World Trade Center buildings with other people jumping out the windows led to something we might call emotional poisoning,” he says. “People have noticed it over and over and over again, and there has been some kind of completely demoralizing effect. When you hear about COVID-19 over and over again, it all leads to a kind of emotional intoxication.
The amount of policy a house deserves to allow depends, again, on the age of young people. “Little ones deserve not to be exposed to this at all,” Gurwitch says. “Don’t think that when they draw or play a game with you while watching TV, they don’t listen.” For older young people who have a greater sense of the current crisis, Gurwitch recommends a limited television regimen. More importantly, it advocates open communication in which parents ask their children what they know, or believe they know, take care of them when they are wrong and validate their fears. Thinking of precautions such as social distance as a way to behave proactively can also help young people regain a sense of control. “This can be presented as follows: “This is what we do to keep our families safe and protect others, and to make sure that the physical care staff don’t have to worry about us,” Gurwitch says.
Eventually, the pandemic will assume its place in the canon of national traumas, alongside 9/11, the Challenger disaster and the Kennedy assassination. The young generation living through coronavirus now will have the same conversations with their peers as they get older–the do-you-remember and where-were-you-when exchanges–as earlier generations have had about those other tragedies. For some, the memories will be of a more private pain. The goal, for parents and professionals and other caregivers, is to help ease that pain, to make the now more bear-able for kids, so that the memories will be too.
This appears to be in the TIME factor of August 3, 2020.