This is a heartbreaking and all too true. As an instructor of many first year college students, I have witnessed first hand the devastation Suzy so achingly describes. The mental health challenges created by isolation coupled with indifferent (even when well meaning) online education will be something we all deal with for years to come.
What has the past two years taught us? That all the mandates and other nonsense doesn’t work and only damaged our children. The institutions that are still following the flawed science need to be sued and need to be stopped. We can’t sit around and watch our children shrivel up. Enough is enough. Demand change. March at these schools until they stop the mandates. And the real question is when are they going to stop counting the numbers. Pointless numbers. Fire fauci. Take power away from the public health branches. There will be Covid and there will be surges. Let people lives their lives. Let children have lives to live.
I'm so ... on one hand a bit ambivalent because yes, we wanted to keep people safe, but damn it ... hospitalizations and deaths are down to seasonal flu rates two ###ing years and they're still pushing all the restrictions and mandates and really really harmful stuff without a care for people, while the rich and elite get more rich and powerful, Trudeau in Canada behaving like a full on dictator, completely dishonest, in complete denial of the reality... WHAT??? What the heck is going on??? Is this the WEF's great reset?? Bari, I salute you for creating a space where we can raise these issues without being CANCELLED ( which is another unbelievable blight on the world and her people, and I mean UNBELIEVABLE... makes so many people sooo angry...)
Here's another bonus that teenagers can look forward to. Dropping SAT requirements and many students who delayed applying to colleges has had a crushing impact on college acceptance rates. My daughter scored in the 99th percentile on her SAT but at least half of the schools she applied to saw their acceptance rates drop into the single digits.
Continuing the SAT/ACT non-requirement, the population bubble of delayed applications, and the continuing of that bubble from delays because students decided to reapply next year and this bottleneck with continue for years.
I spent a long time reading a lot of comments here and am gratified to see so much anger at the harm done to ALL of us by Governments’ responses to Covid. But, I have a question.
I think we all understand that the people who made these decisions are highly educated and experienced - that they are a long way from dumb. I think we all understand that most of the horrific consequences of their Covid policies were entirely predictable - even by poorly educated, inexperienced people. So, why does it seem that the underlying assumption is that these policies resulted from incompetence?
I no longer buy that. I see the Covid response, and defund-the-police, and printing obscene amounts of money, and open borders, etc., as part of a large-scale, intentional, destruction of our economy and our society. These people are not stupid or incompetent- they are evil. They will continue their intentional destruction of our once-free society and robust middle class, as well as our children, if we do not stop them. That will require a lot more courage than we showed over the last two years.
I repeat- these people are not stupid or incompetent- they are evil.
Suzy Weiss is, like her sister, a delighter and thoughtful writer. But I differ here. In WWII, literally millions of children had up to 5 year gaps in their education. They came out well. We have become a weak society, fragile, whining instead of adapting. The story almost celebrates that impotence. I think ti is a mistake. Better to point to what others have done in worse conditions as inspiration.
I'm not referring to Americans, obviously. For Europeans -- they rebuilt a slaughtered civilization within ten years. And the children of the Holocaust -- most recovered and rebuilt lives, certainly not the lives they might otherwise have had, but they persisted. The lockdown in the pandemic, though stressful for sure, is nothing compared to what other generations of young have endured. It's American weakness, compounded by ignorance of anything that occurred before, say, 1990, that is a primary cause of what Weiss describes. And surely the fault of their ahistorical parents.
I am a parent of 2 teen girls in an extremely blue area of a blue state. The pandemic had serious mental health effects on my kids. The loneliness and isolation really impacted them. They closed most outdoor trails and parks in our area, so not only were there no kids to hang out with, but there was nothing open and nothing to do. It was insane and it did not make sense to me-a lifeling liberal Democrat. Our state government just seemed to not care at all about kids worsening mental health. Our schools stayed closed for 17 months. I called school board members, I called principals, I even called a mental health hotline one night sobbing in my car because I did not know how to help my kids. And I was told "hang in there!" by well meaning people but no one seemed willing to do anything. I felt abandoned. It was infuriating to me that restaurants were open but schools weren't. It was infuriating that I had for 12 years worked as a public school PTA parent and raised money and supported our teachers and was now being told by those same teachers that I was a thoughtless & selfish jerk for wanting kids to go back to school-didn't I care about the teachers? Apparently I was supposed to care about them more than my own children.
Now I am still picking up the pieces of my kids mental health and my own (paying out of pocket for therapy because health plan therapy is crap-we are lucky this is even an option for us). One is struggling with anxiety and one is identifying as *trans* . We will be OK. My kids are doing better, and I am glad for this, but me personally? I have a lot of rage that I am not sure what to do with and how to process. Rage at the smugness of the childless Instacart -DoorDash crowd, rage at the school and teachers unions for the abandonment, rage at the ones who use "Follow the science!" as a cudgel to silence people's honest inquiry, rage at the intolerance masquerading as virtue, rage at the indifference to the suffering of our kids, and yes, even rage at the "geez who could have seen this coming?" articles that are now popping up in one MSM publication after another. Well, I saw it coming, so did millions of other parents, but no one listened to us. I am working through it but it has changed me as a person a bit.
Girls/kids may be “growing up” more slowly (Haidt) but studies are also showing girls are starting menarche earlier, according to Abigail Shrier who wrote about the tragic trend of girls “transgendering” themselves, taking testosterone, and puberty blockers. Indeed, this trend is recognized as early as 2016: https://www.sciencealert.com/girls-are-going-through-puberty-earlier-than-ever-before-with-long-term-effects. My 70 year old brain is really struggling to grapple with how different just about everything is for kids today than when I was one, or even than when my kids were kids. The difference was noticeable between my youth and my youngest son’s, but the difference between his youth and his daughter (13) is huge. We used to get married and start families in our 20s. Today, kids wait at least into late 20s, early 30s and for some will pass the age at which having children is practicable/desirable. So, certainly COVID has had terribly deleterious effects on our young, but I think our problems now and future didn’t start there. COVID however, locking down, no doubt led kids to bury themselves in their iPhones and social media more than ever before, thereby exacerbating whatever was already going on.
I relate to so much of this, it's truly sad. My child also engaged in self-harm and had depression during the lockdowns. We did online therapy and then our therapist quit. School has been a nightmare. It feels like it's nearly impossible to catch up in all subjects, in particular math. The school's idea of help is to get other high school students to provide help with homework after school twice a week. It's not helping at all. We need qualified adults to be giving the help. I don't see my child ever recovering from online school where I also had to create a home school while working full-time because there was no instruction for the first 2 months of the pandemic. I don't have the money to pay for help.
Great article. Thank you. Sadly, I don’t think any of this information will matter. The left has an election in November, and no one thinks it has a chance. It needs more crises - and mail-in ballots. If all the other crises it’s created are not enough, Covid will be dredged up - for power - again. The Left’s war on the American People, especially on the lower middle class and our children, will continue.
My husband says the same and I respectfully disagree with you gentlemen. I don’t believe that enough people will go cooperate with any further attempts at covid lockdowns for them to work. Even in blue areas, the curtain has been drawn back and many many people see the Wizard for what he is. And red places will NEVER go along with this crap again. They’re going to have to find something else to try.
I hope you are correct. I certainly won’t be going along with more Covid wealth and power transfers from the People to elite globalist billionaires and politicians. But, those transfers still continue, and are accelerating through brutal inflation and policies designed to eliminate the middle class and destroy our society. The propaganda about Ukraine feels just like the pre-Iraq/Afghanistan propaganda, and we seem headed for WWIII. I still hope. But, I truly believe we will not have a real election in November.
Horrifying! I barely know any teen girls, my daughter is 32, so this was really an "under the radar" stab in the heart.
My goodness. Horrifying and I don't have or barely even know any teen girls.
Take a look at the mandates rally in Los Angeles. Dr. Naomi Wolf. Here-
https://rumble.com/v10jupe-naomi-wolf-you-have-never-faced-the-rage-of-thousands-of-furious-mothers-an.html
There will be a tsunami of accountability. There has to be.
This is a heartbreaking and all too true. As an instructor of many first year college students, I have witnessed first hand the devastation Suzy so achingly describes. The mental health challenges created by isolation coupled with indifferent (even when well meaning) online education will be something we all deal with for years to come.
Thank you for writing this.
What has the past two years taught us? That all the mandates and other nonsense doesn’t work and only damaged our children. The institutions that are still following the flawed science need to be sued and need to be stopped. We can’t sit around and watch our children shrivel up. Enough is enough. Demand change. March at these schools until they stop the mandates. And the real question is when are they going to stop counting the numbers. Pointless numbers. Fire fauci. Take power away from the public health branches. There will be Covid and there will be surges. Let people lives their lives. Let children have lives to live.
I'm so ... on one hand a bit ambivalent because yes, we wanted to keep people safe, but damn it ... hospitalizations and deaths are down to seasonal flu rates two ###ing years and they're still pushing all the restrictions and mandates and really really harmful stuff without a care for people, while the rich and elite get more rich and powerful, Trudeau in Canada behaving like a full on dictator, completely dishonest, in complete denial of the reality... WHAT??? What the heck is going on??? Is this the WEF's great reset?? Bari, I salute you for creating a space where we can raise these issues without being CANCELLED ( which is another unbelievable blight on the world and her people, and I mean UNBELIEVABLE... makes so many people sooo angry...)
Teens are fragile enough. We did not have to snatch two years away from them via unscientific reasons. I hope that they are resilient.
Here's another bonus that teenagers can look forward to. Dropping SAT requirements and many students who delayed applying to colleges has had a crushing impact on college acceptance rates. My daughter scored in the 99th percentile on her SAT but at least half of the schools she applied to saw their acceptance rates drop into the single digits.
Continuing the SAT/ACT non-requirement, the population bubble of delayed applications, and the continuing of that bubble from delays because students decided to reapply next year and this bottleneck with continue for years.
I spent a long time reading a lot of comments here and am gratified to see so much anger at the harm done to ALL of us by Governments’ responses to Covid. But, I have a question.
I think we all understand that the people who made these decisions are highly educated and experienced - that they are a long way from dumb. I think we all understand that most of the horrific consequences of their Covid policies were entirely predictable - even by poorly educated, inexperienced people. So, why does it seem that the underlying assumption is that these policies resulted from incompetence?
I no longer buy that. I see the Covid response, and defund-the-police, and printing obscene amounts of money, and open borders, etc., as part of a large-scale, intentional, destruction of our economy and our society. These people are not stupid or incompetent- they are evil. They will continue their intentional destruction of our once-free society and robust middle class, as well as our children, if we do not stop them. That will require a lot more courage than we showed over the last two years.
I repeat- these people are not stupid or incompetent- they are evil.
I shared this on Facebook a few days ago and within hours FB censored it (content unavailable).
Suzy Weiss is, like her sister, a delighter and thoughtful writer. But I differ here. In WWII, literally millions of children had up to 5 year gaps in their education. They came out well. We have become a weak society, fragile, whining instead of adapting. The story almost celebrates that impotence. I think ti is a mistake. Better to point to what others have done in worse conditions as inspiration.
If you’re talking about American children: where did their education have “up to 5 year gaps?”
If you’re talking about European children: how precisely do you figure they “came out well?”
I'm not referring to Americans, obviously. For Europeans -- they rebuilt a slaughtered civilization within ten years. And the children of the Holocaust -- most recovered and rebuilt lives, certainly not the lives they might otherwise have had, but they persisted. The lockdown in the pandemic, though stressful for sure, is nothing compared to what other generations of young have endured. It's American weakness, compounded by ignorance of anything that occurred before, say, 1990, that is a primary cause of what Weiss describes. And surely the fault of their ahistorical parents.
I am a parent of 2 teen girls in an extremely blue area of a blue state. The pandemic had serious mental health effects on my kids. The loneliness and isolation really impacted them. They closed most outdoor trails and parks in our area, so not only were there no kids to hang out with, but there was nothing open and nothing to do. It was insane and it did not make sense to me-a lifeling liberal Democrat. Our state government just seemed to not care at all about kids worsening mental health. Our schools stayed closed for 17 months. I called school board members, I called principals, I even called a mental health hotline one night sobbing in my car because I did not know how to help my kids. And I was told "hang in there!" by well meaning people but no one seemed willing to do anything. I felt abandoned. It was infuriating to me that restaurants were open but schools weren't. It was infuriating that I had for 12 years worked as a public school PTA parent and raised money and supported our teachers and was now being told by those same teachers that I was a thoughtless & selfish jerk for wanting kids to go back to school-didn't I care about the teachers? Apparently I was supposed to care about them more than my own children.
Now I am still picking up the pieces of my kids mental health and my own (paying out of pocket for therapy because health plan therapy is crap-we are lucky this is even an option for us). One is struggling with anxiety and one is identifying as *trans* . We will be OK. My kids are doing better, and I am glad for this, but me personally? I have a lot of rage that I am not sure what to do with and how to process. Rage at the smugness of the childless Instacart -DoorDash crowd, rage at the school and teachers unions for the abandonment, rage at the ones who use "Follow the science!" as a cudgel to silence people's honest inquiry, rage at the intolerance masquerading as virtue, rage at the indifference to the suffering of our kids, and yes, even rage at the "geez who could have seen this coming?" articles that are now popping up in one MSM publication after another. Well, I saw it coming, so did millions of other parents, but no one listened to us. I am working through it but it has changed me as a person a bit.
Girls/kids may be “growing up” more slowly (Haidt) but studies are also showing girls are starting menarche earlier, according to Abigail Shrier who wrote about the tragic trend of girls “transgendering” themselves, taking testosterone, and puberty blockers. Indeed, this trend is recognized as early as 2016: https://www.sciencealert.com/girls-are-going-through-puberty-earlier-than-ever-before-with-long-term-effects. My 70 year old brain is really struggling to grapple with how different just about everything is for kids today than when I was one, or even than when my kids were kids. The difference was noticeable between my youth and my youngest son’s, but the difference between his youth and his daughter (13) is huge. We used to get married and start families in our 20s. Today, kids wait at least into late 20s, early 30s and for some will pass the age at which having children is practicable/desirable. So, certainly COVID has had terribly deleterious effects on our young, but I think our problems now and future didn’t start there. COVID however, locking down, no doubt led kids to bury themselves in their iPhones and social media more than ever before, thereby exacerbating whatever was already going on.
I relate to so much of this, it's truly sad. My child also engaged in self-harm and had depression during the lockdowns. We did online therapy and then our therapist quit. School has been a nightmare. It feels like it's nearly impossible to catch up in all subjects, in particular math. The school's idea of help is to get other high school students to provide help with homework after school twice a week. It's not helping at all. We need qualified adults to be giving the help. I don't see my child ever recovering from online school where I also had to create a home school while working full-time because there was no instruction for the first 2 months of the pandemic. I don't have the money to pay for help.
Great article. Thank you. Sadly, I don’t think any of this information will matter. The left has an election in November, and no one thinks it has a chance. It needs more crises - and mail-in ballots. If all the other crises it’s created are not enough, Covid will be dredged up - for power - again. The Left’s war on the American People, especially on the lower middle class and our children, will continue.
My husband says the same and I respectfully disagree with you gentlemen. I don’t believe that enough people will go cooperate with any further attempts at covid lockdowns for them to work. Even in blue areas, the curtain has been drawn back and many many people see the Wizard for what he is. And red places will NEVER go along with this crap again. They’re going to have to find something else to try.
I hope you are correct. I certainly won’t be going along with more Covid wealth and power transfers from the People to elite globalist billionaires and politicians. But, those transfers still continue, and are accelerating through brutal inflation and policies designed to eliminate the middle class and destroy our society. The propaganda about Ukraine feels just like the pre-Iraq/Afghanistan propaganda, and we seem headed for WWIII. I still hope. But, I truly believe we will not have a real election in November.