The Kids Aren’t Alright
P robably in 1965, when The Who recorded “The Kids Are Alright” on their My Generation album, they got it right. But that was then—not so much now.
Pandemic stories abound about the impact of the last twenty months on adults—lost jobs, destroyed finances, burnt-out frontline workers, small businesses closing, workers resigning or retiring, housing difficulties, physical and social isolation. The impacts on our youngsters don’t hit the headlines as often, though, because the youngsters themselves are not as visible and their situations do not generate as many data points. But data points are there.
More students, for example, are skipping schools in multiple ways. Enrollment in public schools has declined, as has enrollment in public colleges. Among elementary and high school students, the absenteeism rate pre-pandemic was just over 4 percent. Now, the rate is close to 10 percent—a doubling of the rate in a dramatically short time. The causes are multiple. Absenteeism is higher in both remote and in-person schools. Some students lacked reliable internet. Some may have had to stay home while their essential-worker parents left home and needed babysitters for their younger children. Some could not adjust to remote school, while others had trouble adjusting back to in-person school. Whatever the reasons, more students are missing more days of school. And studies show that just a few weeks of missing school can have detrimental effects on test scores and on social development, which will affect their future success.
Schools are not the only places where the pain of our youngsters shows up. Take a look at almost any of the Emergency Departments in our eastern Massachusetts hospitals and what will you find? Rooms and beds filled to capacity, often including a number of teens waiting for in-patient psychiatric assessment and treatment. On a day at the end of October, there were nearly 200 kids with behavioral health problems who were “boarding” in Massachusetts hospitals—that is, waiting at least 12 hours for treatment–according to the Massachusetts Hospital Association. Some teens have had to wait two weeks or more in an Emergency Department for a bed for mental health treatment. Even if those youngsters were not all there as a direct result of COVID, many were there due to pandemic-related societal and familial disruptions that blew up their worlds.
Some of you will read this and think, okay, that may be true in some places. But not here, not in Lexington. We have strong families, engaged parents, great schools, spiritual communities, abundant opportunities for our youngsters to pursue a wide variety of passions, great futures for our children—so our teens are not vulnerable like the teens in other places who are truly struggling.
I wish I could tell you that our kids are better off than those elsewhere. Certainly many of them are financially safer. But our kids—your kids—are suffering in many other ways.
Youth Counseling Connections is a small Lexington non-profit that provides free counseling services to teens who seek help for mental or emotional help. We provide short-term counseling, at no cost, to teens and their families to help them with intense, short-term mental health crises, whether that is a bout of depression, high-level anxiety, or suicidal ideation. We also work in tandem with the Lexington schools to try to change the culture for our teens, to give them the understanding that they have certain strengths sufficient to deal with difficult times.
In a normal year, YCC sees an increase in the number of teens over time. In previous years, we had very few teens coming in during the early fall. As pressures mounted during the school year and winter came on, our numbers rose.
This year, by contrast, teens—some with their families in tow–have come in earlier and in numbers much greater than anything we have seen before. Teens have found us by way of referrals from school personnel, from parents who have looked us up on the web, and by word of mouth from other teens who know of us or may have received counseling with us. Our counseling slots, both in-person and remote, have been filling up regularly far more quickly than ever before, with semester exams and a long, dark winter still ahead of us.
The schools also are seeing the discontent of our kids. We have teens who are not attending Lexington schools as regularly as they have in the past. Some of the students have had trouble reacclimating to in-person schooling—shy or anxious teens may prefer remote schooling. We have students worried about their social skills after a year of being alone. Others believe they have lost friends over the pandemic. And our juniors and seniors face much more uncertain futures than the classes that went before them.
Our teens have endured isolation, learning from screens, inability to participate in the athletics and clubs they love, lost proms and graduations and debates and concerts, and being tied to families that their biology and normal adolescent development suggests they should start to separate from. Many may prefer school to home, but even for those students, school has become a harder and more difficult place to navigate.
The pandemic has hit our kids hard. Some have found ways to handle it better than others, but most have suffered. As a community, we need to understand that their losses, their isolation, their grief, their dislocations have been just as powerful and destructive as those experienced by the parents and adults around them. Twenty months is big chunk out of the life of a sixteen-year-old, and the loss of normalcy at that age can all too often bring disorientation and despair.
If your kids have come through the pandemic in fine shape, that’s wonderful. But your neighbor’s kids, or your nieces or your nephews, or the kids across the street, may not have. So please: listen and watch them closely without being overbearing or micro-managing their lives; look for signs of sadness, withdrawal, or anxiety; evaluate whether your child is behaving in difficult or potentially risky ways; and give your kids a few more breaks, a few more times to chill out, to help them handle the overload of stress and confusion. If they show any unusual behavior or indicate any interest in talking to a therapist, help them get to a therapist or a health care professional, whether with you or without you.
We have vaccines for COVID and pills are on the way. We have medications for mental health treatment as well, but to get to those, your kids first need to talk to clinicians who can help. Our kids are not alright. But they can be, if we recognize their struggles and give them a little help.
Jamie Katz lives in Lexington with his wife and dog. He is the General Counsel of Beth Israel Lahey Health and past Co-President of Youth Counseling Connections, www.youthcounselingconnections.org.