Jeffrey Kruger writing in the July Time magazine, “Kids are not all right” during this Covid pandemic writes:
“But those same younger kids have acutely twitchy antennae when it comes to reading the anxious mood of the older people around them. The ambient stress in a locked-down household in which parents are fretting, perhaps quarreling, and disinfecting everything that doesn’t move does not go unnoticed by children. “In very young children, you might see more clinginess,” says Gurwitch. “Kids are going to have a harder time sleeping. In children who have been potty-trained, you may see regression and accidents. This is not,” she adds, “a recipe for ease or joy.”
“Then too there is the other sickly victim of the pandemic: the economy, which continues to struggle badly. In a 2018 paper published in Health Economics, Golberstein and his co-authors studied economic conditions in the U.S. from 2001 to 2013 and found that during the Great Recession, a 5-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate correlated with an astounding 35% to 50% increase in “clinically meaningful childhood mental-health problems.” With unemployment now exceeding 11%—compared with 3.6% in January—Golberstein expects to see more of the same emotional blowback. “When the economy is in a bad place, kids’ mental health gets worse,” he says. “This time is going to be much worse because it’s also a pandemic.”
Another variable is whether a child came into the crisis with pre-existing mental-health problems. In the U.S., 7.1% of children in the 3-to-17 age group have been diagnosed with anxiety, according to the CDC. An additional 3.2% in the same age group suffer from depression. Then there are the 7.4% with diagnosed behavior problems and the 9.4% with ADHD. Silver found that in the aftermath of 9/11, adolescents’ level of distress closely tracked whether or not they had a history of such conditions. Other experts expect to see that pattern repeated because of COVID-19.
On July 8 MSNBC reported that 35,000 children have contracted Covid 19 in the USA. 20 % of cases in “hot zones were children. There have been 75 deaths. Many of these deaths were healthy children with no underlying conditions.
In the July 28th Wall Street Journal, Julie Jargon writes that social isolation results in 78% of 5th through 8th grade girls feel more lonely than usual. She reminds parents that kids are always listening even when they appear, they are not and to encourage them to talk openly.
Reassurance, hope, and optimism are important for children who are also under stress during this pandemic.
