Posted on 07/12/2022 8:44:53 AM PDT by lightman
COVID-19 restrictions have damaged children developmentally in ways that might be irreparable, teachers say.
From early childhood to high school, children rely on facial expressions, social interaction, conversation with new people, and friendships to develop mentally.
Children denied social interaction don’t grow mentally in the same way. When governments closed in-person schooling for months, cracked down on activities like play dates, and ordered families to stay home it plunged children into painful isolation.
Now, teachers across America say the lockdown generation lags behind those raised in normal years. Older children have fewer friends and slower minds, while some of the youngest don’t feel the urge to make friends at all.
“One of the biggest differences is the number of kids who have no language,” said Rachel Garcia, a bilingual speech linguist pathologist clinical fellow at Ensemble Therapy Services. She works with children aged 1 to 3 in Palm Desert, California.
Growing Up Alone
As COVID-19 lockdowns continued, Garcia noticed that children aged three and under weren’t learning to talk.
Most babies start talking at about a year old. But many in the lockdown generation aren’t talking even as toddlers, she said.
This problem had devastating implications, Garcia said. Children need to speak for nearly everything.
In a normal year, a few children always struggle with learning to speak. But the pandemic saw these numbers explode.
“I’ve been seeing a lot more of those kids who are two and three years old and have no words,” she said. “That is, in my experience, more than in previous non-COVID years.”
The culprit seemed to be devastating isolation from other children, Garcia said.
Spending time with other young children helps kids learn to talk, she said.
But some lockdown children have gone years without seeing another child—or another adult, Garcia said. Meeting another human being for the first time sometimes terrifies them.
One child cried for a half-hour upon meeting Garcia, she said.
“He got put in a room with me and spent the next 30 minutes crying his eyes out because he was terrified,” she said. “‘There is another person here who is not Mom!’”
“I’ve found throughout evaluating and asking these parents and then treating these kids that, literally, the only people they see are Mom and Dad,” she said. “For two or three years, those are the only people they’ve ever interacted with consistently.”
With only parents as role models, children find themselves in a trap, Garcia said. Parents get good at taking care of their children without language, so they don’t bother learning it.
“Mom and Dad are so in tune with what the kid needs that they just go and do it,” she said.
Moreover, parents have extremely strong language abilities. Young children feel like they can’t reach that level, so they don’t bother starting.
“You don’t see Mom and Dad as people who used to be kids. You see them as Mom and Dad,” said Garcia.
When lockdown children only have their parents to be with, they sometimes become profoundly uninterested in what other people do, she said.
“They don’t look at Mom and Dad, they don’t look at me, because they don’t have to,” Garcia said. “They can go get their own toys, they can go do what they want, they don’t have to respond to you.”
This sort of independence doesn’t make lockdown children stronger, she said. When these children need help, they give up rather than ask others for it.
“It is better and easier for them to walk away from something that they want than to ask for it,” she said.
Lockdown children are so lonely they don’t know the meaning of loneliness, Garcia said.
“They’re perfectly content to play by themselves. They always have. Why should they do anything differently?” she asked.
No Conversation, No Education
Development delays like these have long-term impacts, according to researchers. A child’s vocabulary at two years old predicts their success as they start school, which in turn predicts later success in life.
Even children who weren’t isolated faced big obstacles to learning. Children must learn to differentiate similar sounds and recognize different facial expressions. Masks made both these tasks difficult.
When masks hide adults’ expressions, children understand the meaning of their words less.
A recent survey by the Education Endowment Foundation found that 55 out of 57 schools said they were “very concerned” or “quite concerned” about the communication and language development of children. Schools also said they were concerned over personal, social, emotional, and literacy skills.
It’s still too early to know how the damage done by the lockdowns will impact America’s youngest children throughout their lifetime. But the lockdowns have affected older children across America in the same way, according to several teachers.
From second grade to high school, children seem two years behind developmentally, several teachers told The Epoch Times.
This measure includes both academic learning and social development. And even veteran teachers struggle to help children jump forward two years.
Elementary School
The children Garcia works with are too young to be in school yet. But older children are affected by the lockdowns too.
Jessica Bonner, an elementary school speech pathologist in Birmingham, Alabama, said lockdown children don’t socialize as much as children did before COVID-19. Although Bonner switched schools just before the lockdowns, the differences she saw seemed to go beyond the differences between schools.
She said it seems as though parents let phones raise their children during the lockdowns, and children seem to have accepted this new arrangement.
“It naturally was easier just to hand off the kid to their device and let them do whatever they want,” she said. “They’re in their own personal world without us.”
Increased reliance on the Internet has replaced both parents and friends, Bonner added. Often, children sit next to each other watching videos on their tablets rather than interacting with each other, she said.
“They’re sitting next to each other watching something on the tablet instead of really engaging,” she said.
Children like to stay home and use digital schooling, Bonner said. But they tend to be lazy there. They achieve more in person.
“It’s already been shown that they thrive in person when they’re in that building with peers and a teacher,” she said. “I don’t believe that that’s their preferred space.”
Too Easy
Without in-person interaction, children have learned to channel their whole lives through the Internet, Bonner said. School, social interaction, and entertainment all pass through Zoom. This consequence of COVID has enabled children to not pay attention in class.
On screens, children tend to get distracted easily, she said. Zoom learning is no substitute for classroom learning. child at computer Pandemic Zoom school may be a short-lived failure, but online learning is set to soar. (Yuliia D/Shutterstock)
“If you’re not paying attention to the teacher, why are you even on Zoom in the first place?” Bonner said.
The move to online learning is just one of many COVID-19-related decisions that will likely have a long-term impact, said Illinois sixth grade teacher Dan McHenney.
Even after students returned to school, COVID-19 regulations tended to leave room for laziness, he said.
Students who claimed to have COVID-19 received permission to do school online for two weeks, McHenney said.
“That had a very negative effect on commitment,” he said. “I have students that have been gone for 50 days … And that number is still building up, too.”
McHenney said that remote learning was so ineffective that students in 2021 practically weren’t in school. He has seen intelligent students begin to struggle because they weren’t in class enough.
“She is smart,” he said of one student. “She knows how to do it. But once she’s gone, it becomes more and more of a struggle.”
McHenney is new to teaching, but all the other teachers at his school say the children are consistently two years behind schedule, he said.
“I am supposed to start sixth-grade teaching how to divide fractions,” McHenney said. “At the beginning of this year, in many cases, I had to go over addition and subtraction with these kids. That’s a third-grade skill.”
Socially, children are also lagging behind, he said. They make poor decisions.
“I can definitely see that rubbing off,” McHenney said. “Students have been seen scheduling fights in the bathroom, at the school. There are kids that are trying to sharpen pens in my pencil sharpener. And just making poor decisions. They’ll get out of their seat while the teacher’s teaching and they’ll slap some student.”
McHenney blamed these bizarre misbehaviors on TikTok. Students copy online joke videos that aren’t nearly as funny in real life. It’s worse than normal middle-school immaturity, he said.
“I think my other colleagues would agree with that as well,” he said. “Some of the students think that they can do whatever they want.”
McHenney offered the students the chance to fill in pie charts to say what they did each day during the pandemic. Few followed directions, he said. Some kids filled almost the entire pie chart with video games.
“I know that’s not true,” he said. “Not to the extent that they say.”
High School
High schoolers have also been affected, according to former New York City teacher Aghogho. She left her teaching job recently after having a baby.
“I had brand-new kids come into ninth grade, and their whole first year of high school was spent online, basically isolation in their homes,” she said. “That really affected your mental health.”
Since then, Aghogho has seen attendance rates so bad that only half the class showed up. Sometimes, no one showed up for class at all, she said.
The students that did attend often felt fearful because of COVID-19, Aghogho said. It didn’t matter to them that restrictions had ended.
“They just don’t know how to shed the caution of social distancing,” she said. “It’s very difficult to spend two years telling kids to stay away from each other and now you’re telling them it’s okay. And they don’t trust that.”
Although high school students want to make friends, they struggle to know how after two years of isolation, she said.
COVID-19 freshmen suffered the most, Aghogho added. To find friends, they needed to join clubs and play sports. But schools closed all these activities. Some clubs at her school remained closed.
Without friends, the lockdown students feel frustrated, she said. Many feel depressed.
Kylie Ossege
“They show their frustrations at the teachers and at each other. It’s just a weird dynamic,” she said. “I know it’s gonna get better with time going on. But right now, it’s just very strange.”
Guidance counselors struggle to keep up with the scale of the post-lockdown disaster, Aghogho said.
Students spent the last two years on Zoom classes, where they could get away with playing video games all day with class in the background, she said. Now, they rebel against normal academic demands.
“These kids have had this freedom to just do whatever they wanted,” she said. “And now all of a sudden, they’re back in school … They don’t like the structure. It’s an inconvenience. So they want to rebel. If you understand human nature, when you’re trying to force rules on people, their instinct is to rebel. And it’s a rebellion that we’re going through.”
Like in other grade levels, Aghogho’s high school students were two years behind as well. High schoolers face standardized tests that help determine their future careers, she said.
“They have to catch up,” she said.
Aghogho said that despite these challenges, she remains optimistic about teachers’ ability to give their students what they need to graduate.
“I believe in the power of teachers. We are very tough people. I’ve seen a lot of bad cases, kids that others believe will probably not graduate, and they made it,” she said. “So it’s possible.”
The bar for everything is low these days.
First, they made sure that the small business economy was destroyed.
Next, they made sure that the current adult generation was made petrified of human interaction. This kills both community groups and individual thinking.
Now, they are destroying the same sense of community/individuality among the next generation.
Sounds like the puppet masters who have sworn to destroy the American Dream have just about completed their work.
“Sic Semper Tyrannis” will soon replace “E Pluribus Unum” as the national motto if we are not careful.
Yes, that’s all that matters. And knowing which pronouns to use and how to put on a condom. But they don’t seem to use that latter skill in the ‘hood.
In middle-school this was common BEFORE the Plandemic.
Some of this concern over video games could be pure scapegoating.
Before the plandemic it was nigh on impossible to get middle-school students to do lessons on the computer as they all knew how to find and play games.
High school students had smart phones and would shriek and howl when forced to give them up during testing.
Yes. I still see people outside in the hot sun wearing a mask. Terribly sad
DO NOT FORGET what they’ve done to you.
Do not let their sudden realization they are in bad shape politically excuse the last two-plus years of abuses.
They shut down your job.
Called many of you “non-essential.”
Closed your kids’ schools.
Expected you to live off $1200 for months while they got richer and richer.
Denied you the ability to be with your dying loved ones.
Then denied you the ability to give those loved ones a proper funeral.
While they let George Floyd have three.
While they went on vacation.
Visited family.
The hair salon.
They arrested you for paddle boarding by yourself.
They shut down the parks and the playgrounds.
They called you a grandma killer if you questioned them.
Suspended you from social media if you didn’t obey the narrative.
They called you domestic terrorists when you demanded your kids get the education your tax dollars paid for.
They mocked you when you demanded a return to normalcy for children.
They sneer at your concern over empty shelves and exploding grocery and utility bills.
They messed with supply chains and emptied store shelves, while the elites partied on yachts and Martha’s Vineyard.
They queered women’s sports and the military, and made the citizenry pay for it.
They sexualized schoolchildren, and persecuted parents at school board meetings.
They denied you the chance to try alternative treatments for COVID.
Then they fired you for not getting the vaccine.
When you stand up for your freedom, they call you Nazis and bigots.
Do not forget what they have done.
Do not forgive them.
They are hoping that, by November, you have forgotten the nightmareof the last 2+ years.
YOU struggle to make ends meet and the best the Biden administration can do is free crack pipes for “racial equity.”
This is on top of the woke, cancel culture bull they shove down our throats, the 2020 riots, being accused of racism and bigotry because we oppose their agenda.
As the election draws closer, they’ll pretend they didn’t do any of this.
They’ll gaslight us.
Project.
Blame the GOP (like they tried to when defunding the police went south).
DO NOT give them power.
They haven’t learned a damn thing from this.
You re-elect them, and you can expect masks and lockdowns and nonsense in perpetuity.
Not just for COVID, but for whatever else they deem a
“public health emergency” (guns, climate change).
(Remember, they are the very same people who ignore a pubic health emergency aka AIDS.)
They will trample your rights.
VOTE THEM OUT.
NEVER FORGET.
REMEMBER in NOVEMBER!
COVID-19 Lockdowns Damaged Speech and Mental Development of Children, Say Teachers
It did the same thing to Presidents, Vice Presidents and First Ladies.
Gee, who didn’t SEE this? Oh yeah the leftist maskateer pros.
*shakeshead*
This COVID BS continues on.....
Wanna an eye-opener?
Want some deep food for thought?
https://americasbestpics.com/picture/among-all-the-vaccines-i-have-known-in-my-life-vwM4gTKF9
Wake up!
I can’t see how it would hurt the young kids to just have their parents talking to them. I the days where more of the country was agrarian a couple out on a remote farmstead who only had one child could still nurture the child.
Why would it be any different during the lockdown unless the parents were totally ignorant.
The teachers and their unions are a big part of the problem. They're the ones who are pushing for lockdowns and masks along with CRT and the genderqueer curriculum.
Parents could have told them this.
We now have an entire generation who don’t know their gender, can’t relate to others and are convinced that we are going to kill the planet.
There’s a school in the Atlanta area where 79% of the 8th graders can’t read even simple words. Most of them are doomed to one of two fates: get pregnant, drop out of high school and go on welfare or drop out of high school, get arrested and go to jail.
The situation needs an intervention before these kids grow up.
Quick response to headline only: No $#!+, Sherlock - what was your first clue???
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