8 | New Scientist | 6 March 2021SCHOOLS have been closed in
England for about two months
amid a national lockdown, and
I have lost count of the number
of times my daughter has cried.
She is normally cheerful, but
throughout this time, she has
dissolved into tears most days.
She misses her friends and finds
Zoom lessons stressful.
In England, schools will reopen
next week, but that isn’t the case
everywhere: in some US states,
such as California, schools have
been closed for almost a full year.
At the start of this pandemic,
many parents had a sense of
solidarity, even adventure. Now
many of us are grumpy and tired,
and feel close to burnout. What
effect has all this had on our kids?
“We need to consider children
in all of this, and we’re just not,”
says Tamsin Ford at the University
of Cambridge.
England and Scotland joined
Wales and Northern Ireland in the
latest UK lockdown on 5 January,
with schools in England closing
after many children had gone back
for one day. Prime Minister Boris
Johnson has since announced that
schools in England will reopen for
all pupils on 8 March. The rest of
the UK will have a staggered returnto school, depending on age.
But schools in some US states
look set to remain closed for
the foreseeable future and they
are currently fully closed in
26 countries. So far, there is little
data on how the closures are
affecting children. But there is
a lot of information about the
impact the first lockdown had.
On 11 January, Ford and her
colleagues published a study ofthe mental health of 3570 children
in England aged from 5 to 16, who
have been tracked over several
years as part of an even longer-
term study. They assessed the
children on their emotions,
behaviour and relationships,
and used that to estimate how
many would be classed as having
a mental health problem if they
were seen by a clinician.
The researchers found that
the incidence of probable mental
health problems rose from
10.8 per cent in 2017 to 16 per
cent in July 2020. Many children
experienced disrupted sleep
and loneliness in July, and they
were more likely to have a problem
if a parent was in psychological
distress. Similar trends have been
seen in other countries.
These impacts don’t fall equally
on everyone, says Ford. “Young
women look like they’re doingparticularly badly, as do children
in poverty.”
There are clear inequalities,
says Cathy Creswell at the
University of Oxford, who has
been tracking families month
by month throughout the
coronavirus pandemic in her
Co-SPACE study. “We consistently
see elevated levels of mental
health difficulties among young
people living in low-income
families, as well as among children
with special educational needs.”No safety net
The inequalities are worse in
nations with limited social safety
nets, says Megan McClelland at
Oregon State University. In her
state, she knows of “kids who have
to go sit in a parking lot in a big
supermarket in order to get Wi-Fi
in order to get homeschooled”.There is also evidence that the
impacts vary by age. For instance,
children in the UK of primary
school age, typically between
5 and 10 years old, seem to have
experienced more loneliness
than teenagers during lockdown,
perhaps because fewer have their
own phones or social media
accounts. But among teenagers,
there is evidence that the oldest
ones have had it worse.
A study called OxWell, co-led
by Mina Fazel at the University of
Oxford, surveyed 19,000 children
and young people in England
aged from 8 to 18. A preliminary
report last September found
there were bigger negative
impacts on well-being, and
lower life satisfaction, among
the oldest teenagers.
Our understanding of the
situation of schoolchildren and
teenagers is incomplete, says“ Some kids in the US have
to go sit in a parking lot in
a big supermarket to get
Wi-Fi for homeschooling”
LockdownMRS/GET
T^ IMAGESChildren of the pandemic
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