Loneliness, Anxiety and Loss: the Covid Pandemic’s Terrible Toll on Kids

A year of school shutdowns and family trauma leads to social isolation, stress and mental-health issues

By Andrea Petersen of The WSJ. Excerpts: 

"Harvard University researchers who have been following 224 children ages 7 to 15 found that about two-thirds of them had clinically significant symptoms of anxiety and depression, and the same number had behavioral problems such as hyperactivity and inattention, between November 2020 and January 2021. That is a huge jump from the 30% with anxiety and depression symptoms and the 20% with behavioral problems before the pandemic. Symptoms were more common in children who had experiences such as having a family member hospitalized or dying from Covid, or a parent losing a job.

“There’s more family conflict because of the pandemic. That is leading to stress, acting out, increased suicidal thoughts in the kids,” says David Axelson, chief of psychiatry at Nationwide Children’s. Dr. Axelson says visits to his hospital’s psychiatric crisis department, for emergencies including suicidal thoughts, aggression and psychosis, were up 14% this fall and winter from a year earlier."

"For much of the academic year, many students were stuck at home with remote instruction. Evidence is mounting their learning suffered.

In the fall of 2020, math performance among third- to eighth-graders was 5 to 10 percentile points lower than it was in the fall of 2019, according to a report by the Brookings Institution. An analysis by McKinsey & Co. estimates that Covid-related learning losses among kindergarten to 12th-grade students will reduce their lifetime earnings by between $61,000 and $82,000. And those numbers assumed that students would largely be learning in person by January 2021."

"In a June 2020 survey of 1,011 U.S. parents published in the journal Pediatrics, 14% said their children’s behavioral health had worsened since March."

"Between mid-March and mid-October 2020, the number of mental-health-related ER visits per 100,000 total visits rose from the year-earlier period by 24% for 5- to 11-year-olds and by 31% for 12- to 17-year-olds"

"A fourth of parents of children attending school remotely said their kids’ mental or emotional health worsened, compared with 16% whose kids were attending in person only"

"Doctors say they also are seeing more children with eating disorders. The Center of Excellence in Eating and Weight Disorders at Mount Sinai Health System in New York has received about 105 calls a week over the past year, up from about 30 before the pandemic. The majority were from families with children ages 8 to 14, when disorders like anorexia often emerge, says Tom Hildebrandt, the center’s chief."

"Michaela Voss, medical director of the eating disorders center at Children’s Mercy in Kansas City, says hospital admissions for children with eating disorders have risen substantially during the pandemic. With many schools shut down and organized sports canceled, some children felt “there was nothing else to do but exercise and stare at their bodies in mirrors,” Dr. Voss says."