Researchers are starting to better understand the consequences of wearing masks and how normal childhood development has been undermined amid the pandemic
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.”
Researchers are starting to better understand the consequences of wearing masks and how normal childhood development has been undermined amid the pandemic
Stupid and/or ignorant works best for the DEMs.
That's nothing. My sister teaches math mostly to middle school kids at a "magnet" school in downtown Baltimore. She occasionally teaches the high school seniors. If you ask one of them to divide one-half by two, they are utterly and completely befuddled. These are kids who are going to be graduating with high school degrees and most are headed to college!
If she gives them this, their heads explode...
I think listening to what passes for music these days is also an influence.
Everyone fell for it and continue to faithfully believe to this day
real cold virus
fake Pandemic
“Often, children sit next to each other watching videos on their tablets rather than interacting with each other, she said.”
Take the tablets away. Duh.
Apparently it’s true
https://nypost.com/2022/07/12/video-shows-child-hit-and-swear-at-cop-in-minnesota/
(Though this goes way beyond pandemic lockdowns, and is more fro family breakdown)
Apparently had the same effect on Biden.
that whole "dem vs repub" thing is just a trick to keep us fighting and blaming each other instead of THEM ( the perps)
I think we lost a generation. Or maybe two.
I seem to recall teachers and teacher unions wanting shutdowns, masking, plexiglass barriers, social distancing and constant testing. Let’s make it very clear. Teacher have no credibility. We know the type of people they are. We went to high school and college with them. They are not highly intelligent. They are not well educated. Most are leftists and many are illiterate.
Teachers and government schools have failed. They are getting worse. American schools were ranked in the top of all nations in the early 70’s and before. Our schools are struggling to be in the top 25 today. That’s failure. That is teachers failing. That’s teacher unions failing. That’s government failing.
Teachers: STFU. You are the problem. You are not the solution. I bet teachers feel zero remorse for the development problems that they caused in our children. Your pay is going to be cut. Your benefits slashed. And many of you will be working in fast food. We are coming for you.
That seemed to have turned during the mid to late 70's, when dumbassery was held up as something to strive for.
Nah, we’re in great shape. We went from #1 in math and sciences worldwide a few decades ago to #48 (or so). Everything is fine.
That’s when being smart was made the equivalent of “acting white” or “acting like the man.”
Let’s make it very clear. Teacher have no credibility. We know the type of people they are.
**********
The bar for teachers is pretty low these days. The ability to push liberal dogma is about all it takes.
Instead, government is still trying to sell to the masses some idea that they saved us from an apocalypse.
The bar was low over 40 years ago when I went to college.
The bar was low over 40 years ago when I went to college.
At least all those students got participation trophies to make them feel good.
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