BLOG: What our children have taught us during the pandemic
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Lord Rochester once famously said, “Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children. Now I have six children — and no theories.”
Indeed, raising kids may be the most perplexing challenge of our lives, and the pandemic has introduced a whole new set of obstacles for parents. As a physician, a Scout leader and a parent of three, I have made my own observations of our kids during the pandemic:
1. Young kids learn best in the classroom. Staring at a small screen and listening through speakers deprive a child of the multisensory input required for effective learning. Ask any teacher. Elementary-age kids need a mix of physical activity and focused concentration. Intermittent social engagement with peers drives motivation and helps the brain absorb new concepts. You only need to observe the expression of a classroom of kids on a Zoom call. Their constant motion tells you their eyes and ears are everywhere but on their lesson. If you thought being a doctor was hard, try teaching a group of 30 6-year-olds on Zoom.
2. The stress of the pandemic on kids is real. A study published in July in Psychiatry Research on pediatric mental illness in China used data from validated questionnaires that measure pediatric mental illness. At baseline, depression and anxiety together had an incidence of 13.4% in the studied population. During COVID, this rose to about 40% in two separate studies. Depression alone was present in 22.6% and anxiety in 19% of the school-aged children studied.
3. Dry eye may be a secondary pandemic. While the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends limiting screen time to 2 hours a day for children older than 3 years of age, the average child in the U.S. is spending more than 5 hours a day on screens during the pandemic. We intuitively know this causes dry eye, and according to at least one well-done study in Korea, there was a significant association between increasing screen time and objective signs of dry eye among nearly 1,000 children studied. Because we know dry eye is a progressive, life-long disease, permanent implications may exist for these children. If they are dry now, what will their eyes look like when they are 70? Public education around this possible secondary pandemic is certainly merited.
4. Kids need to be outside. A psychologist at Manhattanville College surveyed 800 mothers who grew up in the 2000s. While 76% of the mothers reported spending significant time outdoors during childhood, only 26% of their children did. And that was before the pandemic. The Korean study described above showed a significant inverse correlation between dry eye and children spending time outdoors, with those having more outdoor activities having less dry eye. Beyond ocular implications, the behavioral scientist Richard Louv has published extensively on a syndrome called “nature-deficit disorder.” According to Louv, children with less unstructured outdoor play time have a harder time walking on uneven surfaces, a greater incidence of attention-deficit disorder, depression and anxiety, less resilience, and less creative problem-solving skills. In other words, it’s now more important than ever to get kids outside.
Some of these lessons about the pandemic we might have anticipated. Should the world face another shutdown, I hope we as a society can be more proactive about addressing the psychological and physical needs of our kids. Meanwhile, a whole generation of our growing kids will continue to give us a report card on how we raised them when the world shut down.
References:
- Moon JH, et al. BMC Ophthalmol. 2016;doi:10.1186/s12886-016-0364-4.
- Racine N, et al. Psychiatry Res. 2020;doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2020.113307.
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