According to a new report from the CDC, COVID-19 had an alarming effect on adolescents in America. More than a third of high school students “reported they experienced poor mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic”—with 44 percent saying they “persistently felt sad or hopeless during the past year.”
“These data echo a cry for help,” said CDC Acting Principal Deputy Director Debra Houry in a statement.
We already knew that COVID, and the concomitant shutdowns, led to an uptick in mental health challenges (the number of adolescents reporting “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” is up 7 percent from 2019), but this new report sheds greater light on the reasons.
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For example, the data demonstrate that “Youth who felt connected to adults and peers at school were significantly less likely than those who did not to report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness…”
To anyone familiar with the science of happiness, this was utterly predictable. According to Harvard professor and social scientist Arthur Brooks, author of the book Gross National Happiness, we are more likely to be happy when we “pour ourselves into faith, family, community and meaningful work.”
For adolescents, school attendance could account for half of the ingredients in Brooks’ happiness recipe. Uprooting someone from their community and sense of purpose was bound to have negative consequences. And so it did.
Adolescents (who often experience emotional turmoil even without a pandemic thrown into the mix) were always likely to be disproportionately hit by this uprooting.
Complicating matters, being forced to stay home meant young people were also forced to bear the brunt of their stressed parents’ anxieties and struggles (29 percent of students in the survey reported a parent or adult in their home lost a job). More than half of the teens surveyed reported experiencing emotional abuse by a parent or adult at home, such as being sworn at or insulted. And 11 percent reported experiencing some form of physical abuse. (This is up dramatically from data collected in 2013, when around 14 percent of students said they were emotionally abused, and just 5.5 percent reported physical abuse.)
There is no excuse for abuse, at all, but it’s clear that the stresses of lockdowns created a toxic brew. If you take adults worried about keeping their jobs and surviving a deadly virus, lock them at home with their kids 24/7, and deputize them to be teachers—you’re going to have a lot of people living at the end of their ropes.
Health and public policy experts can be forgiven for not always making the right call, particularly in the early months of the pandemic in 2020. We were all trying to figure out how to survive and how to make cost-benefit analyses of risk, even as the scientific guidance kept changing.
During that miserably chaotic time two years ago when we were all obsessively washing our hands, complaining about Florida spring breakers, yearning for a vaccine, and wiping down groceries with bleach towels, it made sense to shut down schools until we figured out what the hell was going on. It was out of an abundance of caution (and out of a love for our children). But after a few months, such extreme caution made less and less sense.
But there were always going to be tradeoffs, and our government (which was too often at the mercy of teacher’s unions’ demands) made a huge mistake by keeping so many schools closed for so long. In some of the U.S.’ most populous metro areas, schools were closed for as long as 18 months.
This was done based on the flawed assumption that kids were safer at home than in school. But two years into COVID, the benefits of sequestering students for so long do not seem to have outweighed the many costs.
This is certainly true when you factor in the damage done to students’ mental health, but there were other related negative externalities—including the fact that about a third of students reported that their intake of drugs (including marijuana, nicotine, and alcohol) increased during the pandemic.
The CDC also notes in the report that mental health problems can be associated with high-risk sexual behaviors that could lead to HIV, STDs, and teen pregnancy.
All of these factors should have been considered when calculating the risk versus reward of closing schools. Yet, one gets the sense they weren’t. Too often, in fact, it seemed like anyone who dared to bring up the obvious emotional and mental consequences of sequestering students was accused of “wanting their babysitters back” or “not caring about teachers’ lives.”
To be sure, there may well be occasions when prudence demands that schools be shuttered. That was not the case after 2020. Yet, all too often, school closures were prolonged by teachers’ unions—a major Democratic donor constituency—who directly influenced CDC policy and seemed hellbent on making sure their members could work from home.
Ironically, the most vulnerable students—kids that progressives ostensibly want to help the most—were the hardest hit by the shutdowns. Female and LGBTQ+ students, for example, reported higher incidence of emotional abuse, and higher levels of poor mental health. As The Washington Post reports, “Nearly half of gay, lesbian and bisexual teens said they had contemplated suicide during the pandemic, compared with 14 percent of their heterosexual peers.”
And, of course, aside from the blow dealt to adolescents’ mental health, the pandemic had a devastating impact on learning—which had a disproportionate impact on children and teens from lower-income households by “intensifying existing disparities.”
On top of all the tangible damage already done, the pandemic (and our reaction to it) will likely increase income inequality and the education gap.
Again, we can make some allowance for the shutdowns of 2020. But across the country, the extent of the mitigation policies did not follow the science. Indeed, way back in Nov. 2020, CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said, “The truth is for kids kindergarten through 12, one of the safest places can be, from our perspective, is to remain in school.” That same month, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “Close the bars and keep the schools open.”
Now that we are seeing more data, there should be a national conversation, and our political leaders shouldn’t hide from the reckoning—if for no other reason than to make it less likely we will repeat the same sort of mistakes in the future.
In some way or another, we will probably be dealing with the negative impacts of prolonged school shutdowns for the rest of our lives.
We can and should assess the damage done, soberly discuss what worked and what didn’t, and plan for the next inevitable pandemic accordingly.
