The Covid Pandemic and The Great Depression Table

How the Covid Pandemic Will Follow Today’s Kids Into Adulthood

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Now that Covid-19 is steaming into its third year, brain scientists, psychiatrists, educators and economists are starting to ask how the generation of children coming of age will be affected as adults.

It’s a complex forecast likely to vary widely by country and class. While some kids will become stronger and more resilient adults, many are at risk for increased struggles across their lifetime. Scientists compare the shadow cast by the pandemic across this generation to the imprint left on the children of the Great Depression.

A critical variable: Could steps be taken to mitigate the damage? Some researchers see opportunities there—if resources are brought to bear.

Children will be most affected because they are in their formative years, said Sean Deoni, director of MRI Research at Rhode Island Hospital and a professor at Brown University.

Since 2009, Dr. Deoni’s lab has measured the cognitive development of children and adolescents. A year and a half into the pandemic, the IQ scores of 700 children from newborns up to the age of three, fell to an average of about 80 from 100 in the previous years. They have since ticked up slightly.

Dr. Deoni attributes the decline to less social interaction during Covid during a critical period of brain development. “There was just less stimulation,” he said.

The permanence of the decline remains an open question, he said. Children’s brains are very elastic, but research shows the foundation for adulthood is laid in the first 1,000 days of life. IQ scores begin to stabilize starting around the age of 5, he said.

For school-age children, concerns center on the impact of missed months or even years of class.

Of about 2 billion school-age children in the world, 1.6 billion missed a significant amount of classroom time during the pandemic, according to a UNICEF report published in December 2021. Previous disruptions offer some insight about what that loss could portend.

In Argentina, regional teacher strikes were so common between 1988 and 2014 that primary students in some regions of the country missed an average of 88 days of school over the course of their primary-school education,

according to a 2019 paper

published by the Journal of Labor Economics and co-authored by Alexander Willén, a professor of economics at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen, Norway.

Those students attained less education, accrued fewer skills, and, as adults, had higher rates of unemployment than students who were in districts without teacher strikes. The impact was greater on younger students and those from poorer families.

When they reached the ages of 30 to 40, the men earned 3.2% less and the women 1.9% less than those who weren’t affected by strikes during their school years, according to the paper.

Parents—usually mothers—were forced out of the workforce to care for children when schools closed. That later drove down their wages. The children of the students affected by the strike also fared less well in school.

“Since short-run results of the pandemic seem to be aligned very well, there is a case for assuming school closings may have similar impact in the long run on effects on wages,” Dr. Willén said.

Globally, full and partial school closures lasted an average of 224 days during the first 21 months of the pandemic, according to the

December 2021 joint report

by UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank. School closures generally lasted longer in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries.

Many students in the U.S. fell behind by between three and six months, according to a national assessment test

analyzed by a collaborative of researchers

at Harvard University, the American Institutes for Research, Dartmouth College and the school-testing non profit NWEA . Children in many countries in Asia and the southern part of the world lost the equivalent of between one and two years, according to the joint World Bank report.

“Because disruption to education was uneven, the consequences will be too,’’ said Dr. Jaime Saavedra, who leads the Education Global Practice at the World Bank Group.

Generally, each year of education adds about 10% to lifetime earnings, Dr. Saavedra said. The current generation of students in low- and middle-income countries is projected to lose an average $975 in annual income, or $11 trillion in lifetime earnings in present value, according to the joint report.

“If you have more inequality of opportunity between countries, if you see a larger gap in education, in human capital, between the rich and the rest, that creates the potential for social instability,” Dr. Saavedra said. “This is a silent crisis, you don’t see this instability today but you may see it in the future.”

To help children overcome these setbacks, Dr. Saavedra champions an approach of first assessing learning loss, then increasing remedial education with small-group tutoring sessions over the course of a longer school year.

In the U.S. much of the concern around children is focused on damage to their mental health from the repeated and ongoing stress caused by the pandemic. The impact is already clear:The proportion of emergency-room visits for mental-health reasons, as compared with all others, in 2020 increased by 24% among children ages 5-11 and 31% among those 12-17, compared with the previous year,

according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Among adolescent girls, visits for eating disorders doubled and visits for tic disorders tripled in 2020 from the year before, the CDC said.

Extrapolating from that, roughly 5% of girls in that age group suffered from eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia, said Evelyn Attia, the medical director at the center for eating disorders at Columbia University. The likely culprit:isolation and extended time on social media and Zoom.

In a generation, “we may see more adult women with some of the secondary effects” from eating disorders, such as brittle bones, she said.

One in three children affected by Hurricane Katrina was suffering from “serious emotional disturbance” five years after the storm, said Dr. David Abramson, who followed 1,000 households of families affected by it. That group included about 400 children who ranged from newborns to age 13 at the time of the storm and translates to a fivefold increase over the national average.

Dr. Abramson, a professor at NYU’s School of Global Public Health, said that if children experience Covid-related trauma such as the death of a parent, a major economic loss or a significant bout of Covid-related illness, they may be vulnerable at three pinch points in their lives.

The first will be in three to five years when the reality of the permanence of the trauma settles in. The second will come in their twenties when they have a harder time reaching the milestones of adulthood like buying a home or finding a long-term partner. The third will follow in their 50s, when they become more prone to diseases such as schizophrenia and diabetes.

He compared the impact of the pandemic to the Great Depression because in both cases the economic fallout blanketed the nation but was particularly destructive across some groups.

“Kids in specific neighborhoods and socioeconomic classes definitely suffered in similar ways,” he said.

For students who are not adversely affected, the pandemic likely has a silver lining, said Laura Clary, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School for Public Health.

Dr. Clary interviewed 151 students in the Baltimore Public Schools last year and found that about half viewed the pandemic as either a neutral or positive experience. Students slept more and had more time to spend with family and pursue hobbies. They faced less bullying and academic stress, she said.

By overcoming something difficult, they may grow more resilient, Dr. Clary said. Increasing access to mental-health counseling in schools will also be important to help students who are still struggling.

“Resilience is like a rubber band,” she said. “If you use it, it makes you stronger and you can develop the skills that allow you to navigate new situations later in life.”Article Evaluation Assignment and Template

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Practice applying intellectual standards to evaluate an author’s claims.

Read one of the assigned articles to use for this assignment.

Using the template below, for each of the nine (9) intellectual standards, provide an example from the article where the author met the standard, and an example from the article where the author failed to meet the standard. For some standards, you may need or want to make an overall evaluation, rather than use a direct quote. For example, you may say that the topic meets the significance standard overall, because global warming is an important and pressing issue for humans to address now.Use a variety of quotes/ideas – avoid using the same quote twice.

Explain why the standard is/is not met.  Make sure to provide evidence and examples from the article, and refer to the standards by name.

Refer to the questions below to assist you in evaluating each standard.

Clarity – gateway standard

Could you elaborate further on that point? Could you express that point in another way? Could you give me an illustration? Could you give me an example? Clarity is the gateway standard. If a statement is unclear, we cannot determine whether it is accurate or relevant. In fact, we cannot tell anything about it because we don’t yet know what it is saying. For example, the question, “What can be done about the education system in America?” is unclear. In order to address the question adequately, we would need to have a clearer understanding of what the person asking the question is considering the “problem” to be. A clearer question might be “What can educators do to ensure that students learn the skills and abilities which help them function successfully on the job and in their daily decision-making?”

Accuracy

Is it true? How could we check that? How could we find out if that is true? A statement can be clear but not accurate, as in “Fifty percent of dogs in the US are over 300 pounds in weight. Testable facts can be accurate – opinions cannot be tested for accuracy. Select a claim stated as a fact. It is sometimes difficult to find a simple falsehood. You can also identify an exaggeration of the truth and explain why the statement is false because it is an exaggeration of the truth.

Precision

Could you give more details? Could you be more specific?A statement can be both clear and accurate, but not precise, as in “Jack is overweight.” (We don’t know how overweight Jack is, one pound or 500 pounds.)Precise statements are specific and sometimes quantitative. For example, “a lot” is not precise, whereas, “40% of graduate students surveyed in May 2016” is precise.

Relevance

How is that connected to the question? How does that bear on the issue?A statement can be clear, accurate, and precise, but not relevant to the question at issue. For example, students often think that the amount of effort they put into a course should be used in raising their grade in a course. Often, however, the “effort” does not measure the quality of student learning; and when this is so, effort is irrelevant to their appropriate grade.

Depth (with Breadth, is a measure of completeness, sufficiency)

How does your answer address the complexities in the question? How are you taking into account the problems in the question? A statement can be clear, accurate, precise, and relevant, but superficial (that is, lack depth). For example, the statement, “Just say No!” which has been used to discourage children and teens from using drugs, is clear, accurate, precise, and relevant. Nevertheless, it lacks depth because it treats an extremely complex issue, the pervasive problem of drug use among young people, superficially. It fails to deal with the complexities of the issue.

Breadth (with Depth, is a measure of completeness, sufficiency)

Do we need to consider another point of view? Is there another way to look at this question? What would this look like from a conservative standpoint? What would this look like from the point of view of . . .? A line of reasoning may be clear accurate, precise, relevant, and deep, but lack breadth (as in an argument from either the conservative or liberal standpoint which gets deeply into an issue, but only recognizes the insights of one side of the question.)

Logic

Does this really make sense? Does that follow from what you said? How does that follow? But before you implied this, and now you are saying that; how can both be true? When we think, we bring a variety of thoughts together into some order. When the combination of thoughts are mutually supporting and make sense in combination, the thinking is “logical.” When the combination is not mutually supporting, is contradictory in some sense or does not “make sense,” the combination is not logical.

Fairness

Do I have a vested interest in this issue? Am I sympathetically representing the viewpoints of others? Human think is often biased in the direction of the thinker – in what are the perceived interests of the thinker. Humans do not naturally consider the rights and needs of others on the same plane with their own rights and needs. We therefore must actively work to make sure we are applying the intellectual standard of fairness to our thinking. Since we naturally see ourselves as fair even when we are unfair, this can be very difficult. A commitment to fairmindedness is a starting place.

Significance

Significance means having relative importance. Is this the most important problem to consider? Is this the central idea to focus on? Is this the most important information to consider?

Article evaluation template

Meets Clarity:

Explanation:

Does Not Meet Clarity:

Explanation:

Meets Accuracy: Note: Example for accuracy must be a claim stated as a fact. You might have to confirm that the statement is true by researching it. Opinions cannot be evaluated for accuracy because they cannot be verified, so don’t use an opinion for this standard.

Explanation:

Does Not Meet Accuracy: Note: Example for accuracy must be a claim stated as a fact. You might have to confirm that the statement is true by researching it. Opinions cannot be evaluated for accuracy because they cannot be verified, so don’t use an opinion for this standard.

Explanation:

Meets Precision:

Explanation:

Does Not Meet Precision:

Explanation:

Meets Relevance:

Explanation:

Does Not Meet Relevance:

Explanation:

Meets Depth:

Explanation:

Does Not Meet Depth:

Explanation:

Meets Breadth:

Explanation:

Does Not Meet Breadth:

Explanation:

Meets Logic:

Explanation:

Does Not Meet Logic:

Explanation:

Meets Fairness:

Explanation:

Does Not Meet Fairness:

Explanation:

Meets Significance:

Explanation:

Does Not Meet Significance:

Explanation: