Lockdown strains mount for children

Laura Chu is worried about her 11-year-old daughter, who has been staying at home for remote learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The girl hasn't seen her school building since Houston, Texas, began a citywide lockdown in mid-March due to the coronavirus.

"Besides schoolwork and online classes, most of her time is spent online playing games or watching others playing games," said Chu. "Lately, sometimes she speaks with nameless anger and uses curse words. This is something new with her."

Chu found some paintings that her daughter did during the pandemic: a skeleton head; one gigantic eye staring out solemnly; and a lonely figure wistfully looking out a window.

The images bothered her. "They are definitely not expressions of happiness. She is less cheerful than before the pandemic."

Chu is not alone. A new survey by the Nationwide Children's Hospital found that two-thirds of parents worry about the effects of the pandemic on their children's mental health and that it will be more challenging to recover the longer the pandemic continues.

Children's mental health problems have been on the rise since the pandemic began. A recent study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that mental health-related visits to hospital emergency rooms by children and adolescents rose from April to October.

Mental health

The study, published in mid-November, found that such visits were up 24 percent for children aged 5 to 11 and 31 percent for those aged 12 to 17, compared with the same period last year. The data include a subset of hospitals in 47 states.

The highest weekly proportion of mental health-related emergency visits occurred during October for children between the ages of 5 and 11 (1,177 per 100,000) and during April for adolescents who are 12 to 17 (4,758 per 100,000).

Even before the coronavirus hit, mental health problems such as depression and anxiety were on the rise in children aged 6 to 17, according to the CDC. And with schools closed, many students have struggled with pandemic-related isolation and stress.

Weighed against the substantial harm to children by keeping schools closed, elementary schools should offer in-person learning, said David Rubin, a pediatrician and infectious disease expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

"I think there's a pretty good base of evidence now that schools can open safely in the presence of strong safety plans and even at higher levels of case incidence than we had suspected," he told The New York Times.