On the menu today: Schools have been open since September, but life in the nation’s classrooms is a long way away from back to “normal.” Today’s Jolt takes a deep dive into the lingering social, psychological, and emotional consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on our kids.
The Pandemic’s Aftermath for Kids
At the start of this school year, one of my best friends started a new job at an elementary school that taught kindergarteners through fifth graders. After a few months, he said that the third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade kids were terrific, but that he was having all kinds of discipline issues — oftentimes just the basics, like getting the kids to understand that they were supposed to stop talking when the teacher was talking — in the kindergarteners, first, and second graders. And he pointed to a reason I hadn’t immediately realized: For a lot of the second graders, this was the first time they had been inside a classroom because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
By March 25, 2020, all public schools in the United States closed because of the pandemic, but some started earlier — Ohio closed all schools on March 12. In my neck of the woods, that was the last normal day; schools were closed Friday the 13th because the school district wanted to plan its response . . . and then they were closed for a week, then two weeks, then a month, and then for the remainder of the school year. They reopened two days a week in March and April 2021, depending upon grade level, and expanded to four days a week in April 2021. So for my kids, it was about a year without in-person schooling, and the spring of 2021 was a long, slow process of reopening school doors and getting kids back into classrooms. When kids returned to school this August and September, for most, it was the first time they had been in a classroom, five days a week, in a year and a half.
A frightening thought is that because it’s hard to remember much before age three or four, the five-, six-, and seven-year-olds of today have little or no memory of life before the pandemic; to them, what we’ve been enduring is “normal.”
I thought of my friend’s observation the other day when I heard from a wise educator who observed that a lot of kids, in terms of social development, are two years behind where they normally would be, at all kinds of ages. While the second graders haven’t been in school before, the pattern continues up the grade levels. The middle-schoolers are acting like elementary-school kids, and the high-school teenagers are acting like middle-school kids. When you take the normal hormonal and mood swings of teenagers, give them bigger, getting-to-be-adult-sized bodies, add stress, and subtract one to two years’ worth of socialization and figuring out how to deal with problems and conflicts, you get something as potentially explosive as nitroglycerin.
Since the kids returned full-time, schools — from New Jersey to California, from Missouri to South Carolina, from Georgia to Oregon — are grappling with all kinds of discipline issues. As one principal described, “In the first nine weeks of school, we had more physical aggression in terms of fights than we probably had in the last maybe three or four years combined.” Some veteran teachers contend that the discipline problems started before the pandemic, but I doubt any would dispute that two years away from classrooms, routines, seeing their teachers in-person, and seeing their peers in-person has retarded their development.
And here’s the catch in school discipline policies: Some infractions are serious enough to easily justify suspending a student; indisputably, if a child or teen is a physical threat to other students, you have to remove that student, at least for a time. But if the disciplinary consequence takes the student from school for a period, that’s just re-isolating the teen again. Some school districts are concluding that the problems are because they’ve been too lenient and will be expelling students for infractions; others are asking if they want to suspend a student for vaping, because it’s better to keep the teen in the classes. A lot of states are debating what discipline policies are appropriate and work best.
Many of us frustrated by the lengthy school closures were enraged by a statement we found far too dismissive and even callous: “Kids are resilient.” (The great Mary Katharine Ham tore this apart back in January.) All too often, that was a blasé slogan designed to excuse an intolerable status quo.
Our kids aren’t necessarily resilient, and we didn’t like having their need to be resilient shoved upon them by teachers’ unions who kept dragging their feet on reopening schools and public-health officials who deemed birthday parties, travel, summer camps, visiting grandparents, etc. an intolerable risk.
But . . . by the time our kids head out into the world, whether it’s to college, trade school, the armed services, or something else, we want them to have acquired a certain amount of resilience. We want to protect our kids, but we don’t want to overprotect our kids. It’s a fine line, and it probably varies from child to child. But before they leave the nest, we want them feeling and knowing that, “I can handle what life throws at me.”
There’s a catch-22 when you’re a parent: You want to ensure that your child avoids making terrible mistakes, but you also want them to learn to overcome adversity — and adversity is often a consequence of terrible mistakes. (Tony Robbins gives an ironic and succinct summary: “Success is the result of good judgment, good judgment is the result of experience, and experience is often the result of bad judgment!”)
If you think back to the worst times in your life — those classes you struggled with, the teacher who always seemed to be on your case, the bully who tormented you, the boss who constantly berated you, the job you hated, the heartbreaking end of a relationship, the stinging professional setback — you probably cringe or feel stress just thinking about it. But you also probably look at those times as a force that absolutely shaped you into the person you are. You didn’t want that experience, but that was the furnace that forged the steel in you. Those horrible times are when you’ve learned how to handle adversity, how to overcome a tough setback, how to be stoic in the face of misfortune. You wouldn’t want to relive it, but you wouldn’t want to give up the lessons those hard times taught you — particularly what you learned about yourself through it. Nobody feels good about themselves when they’ve done something that is easy; we feel pride when we’ve accomplished something difficult.
There’s a good chance you’ve encountered someone — [COUGH] millennials [COUGH] — who strikes you as far too fragile and whiny and who collapses at the first sign of something going wrong. Maybe you know someone who earned that derisive nickname “snowflake,” who is delicate and melts at the first sign of stress, pressure, or heat.
A lot of people love this quote from the Rocky sequel, Rocky Balboa:
“The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.”
The Covid-19 pandemic was — and to the extent that it’s not yet completely over, is — awful, a long and painful ordeal unlike anything else we’ve experienced in our lives. Living with it was like peeling an onion of bad news — there was always some new layer of grief and frustration to discover. The kindly old man down the street passed away. Your child’s school’s “distance learning” software is glitchy. You’ve got to hold a parent’s birthday party over Zoom. Your favorite restaurant shut down. The governor doesn’t want you going to religious services. You’re worried about that elderly relative in a nursing home. Your vacation is canceled. You’re putting on weight because your gym is closed. You can’t go to the movies. You can’t gather with family during the holidays like you used to and can’t enjoy your mother-in-law’s turkey at Thanksgiving. As someone described it early on, “It was as if life had been reduced to nothing but Wednesdays.”
In fact, I wonder if kids’ through-the-roof anxiety levels — and heck, lots of adults’ through-the-roof anxiety levels — are because the pandemic was so far outside of the range of “normal” challenges. Many of us have lived through 9/11; we’ve watched in shock and horror at school shootings like Columbine; lived through economic challenges like the Great Recession; witnessed car wrecks, crime waves, natural disasters. . . .
But none of those terrible events shut down our lives and separated us from our loved ones for months on end. The pandemic wasn’t the apocalypse, but those images of empty city streets and highways did seem like something out of an end-of-the-world movie. (And if you’re living in, say, Shanghai right now, maybe you feel like you’ve been suddenly transported to a sci-fi dystopia.)
There’s little good that came out of this pandemic. But maybe living through all this — and the jagged, rocky, uphill climb to re-socialization — will be the furnace that forges the steel of our kids.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, CNN+ had a grand opening . . . and less than a month later, a grand closing. In the end, CNN+ didn’t offer anything sufficiently unique. As I noted earlier this month, this streaming service didn’t have a programming equivalent of The Mandalorian or Stranger Things or Bridgerton — something really popular that couldn’t be seen anywhere else. It is hard to imagine what CNN could offer that would be akin to that. Maybe the work of Clarissa Ward in Afghanistan and Ukraine over the past year is the most compelling, jaw-dropping, must-watch television journalism that CNN has done in a while. But I’m still not sure people would subscribe to a separate streaming service just to watch it.