Multiple times per week I receive a phone call, email, or social media post about children’s mental health.  A teacher wrote, “I’m having trouble focusing on learning because of the behavioral issues the kids are bringing to our classrooms after more than a year without proper socialization.”  Another:  “They haven’t socialized, so they don’t know good boundaries, and I’m seeing a high increase in depression and anxiety.”

A mom called me in tears, “My son used to be so strong—now he’s anxious back in school.”  A dad: “My daughter had no sports for a year but now, because of masking during athletics, decided not to go back to sports.  We’re losing her to her devices, and she’s only 12.”  A grandmother:  “There’s just so much fear in my grandchildren, now, that I didn’t see before.”  A school principal:  “As Omicron spreads, we have to look at online education, masking, and isolating kids again—we know it’s harmful to them, but what can we do?  So many people are afraid.”

Developing resilience during childhood is key to a child’s future success.  We all know this.  Resilience—grit–is the diamond we want children to find, polish, and wear proudly as they grow.  Children must and will feel scared at various times in life because fear comes with the territory of childhood, and it is painful at times.  But overall, we see it as an opportunity for growth, especially if we adults help children move through their situational fears toward resilience.

Meanwhile, keeping children in constant fear, especially constant fear that is avoidable, sets children up for trouble because this trauma can rewire their brains.  Over the period of weeks, months or years, the amygdala goes into hyper-drive, stimulating a cascade of neurochemistry that can decrease advanced, upper brain function in favor of more limited, survival-oriented development. As pathways to the frontal cortex do not fill in fully, our children end up with behavioral issues, lack of impulse control, and lack of boundaries they may not have had so acutely before.

In this way, areas of the brain built for social-emotional learning become functionally degraded while areas responsive to anxiety, depression, and anger/rage become more active, forcing the brain beyond low grade behavioral mishaps to more mental illness, and an anxiety/fear loop which is accompanied by negativity bias–seeing negatives all the time and seeing oneself as powerless in the negatives; this keeps feeding the child’s own sense of fragility, which can lead to some of the withdrawal and/or anger we are seeing in children.

Because more-than-normal brain function stays in the mid brain and pathways to the frontal cortex don’t fill in, children can seem less mature (and they likely are) and also mentally more impoverished.  Brain scans of children raised in hypervigilance show blank spots in the brain.  As the reason for constant fear, hypervigilance, and social isolation recedes, we might wish our children would “go back out and do things again”—like sports—but in many cases, their rewired brains often seek instant gratification in new forms of quick self-validation, much of it channeled these days through devices.

Knowing intuitively the potential effects of ongoing trauma on children, adults have instinctively tried to protect children from constant fear, whether acuteness of fear was necessary or not.  One thinks of the father in the Italian Academy Award winning movie, Life is Beautiful (1997), who uses storytelling to try to shield his young son from the fact that the little boy, father, and everyone around them are imprisoned in a Nazi death camp.

One thinks historically, too, and especially since industrialization, of parents like you and me who have tried to set up our children’s lives for breadth and depth of opportunity; significant bonding with adults and other children for play and work; access to the best possible health and wellness, and mentors/role models who can focus children on accomplishments in task and work, and empowerment, even fearlessness, in the face of inevitable pain, grief, and adversity.  Our message to children has been, “Life is tough, it expects a lot of you, but you are safe in our homes, schools, and country to grow, learn, persevere, and mature into adulthood and independence. We will build families and social systems–safe emotional containers–for you in which your childhood will transpire,” we parents promise silently at the child’s birth.  “In these containers you will discover who you are, how you are meant to serve your family and others, and what creative and generative pathways you can master in your life.”

Even when children face severe and tragic circumstances such as the genocide depicted in the Italian movie or the domination and imprisonment American slaves faced here, parents and mentors still tried to teach children four pillars of maturity–resilience, bonding, character, and spirit–because those adults sensed the need for hope, and they knew the dysfunction that ongoing fear and despair would bring their progeny.

 

A Nation Afraid of Its Children

 

We are living in a long Covid moment that provides a  “severe circumstance” in many of our children’s lives.  While our Covid response over the last two years is not comparable in severity to the Holocaust or slavery, it is comparable in this way:  most American children are being taught constant fear.  The increase in child and adolescent mental health issues in the two years shows us just how quickly that constant fear, and its resulting hypervigilance, can rewire children’s brains.

Their parents have been afraid and under severe stress—this is a layer of constant fear that passes to children osmotically (invisibly passed to the child via proximity with the parents and other stressed adults).  In your own home or neighborhood you may have seen this osmosis.  In the last two years, your family member or friend may have been lost to the disease, or you as a parent may have lost a job or changed jobs, all of which created situational stress.  Meanwhile, families began schooling children at home while one or both parents worked from home; this created significant stress.  However your family had to adapt, your children may have picked up some adult anxiety and stress.

This is not a bad thing, we might say.  Remember our concept that “life is tough.”  It could build resilience in kids, we might say, as the kids see us adults adapting and adjusting.  Perhaps our children will now have to leave a bit of childhood behind by doing more chores to help out, we might say, and by (hopefully) becoming more self-motivated in their learning as parents have to work.  Also, in remote schooling and work-from-home, children get more intimate family time with parents than before.   We can find various cases of the new Covid family creating positives for children.

But overall, not only do the Covid children pick up their family’s fear; they experience constant fear of their own. To assess this potential danger to brain development, please look at these questions.

Have your children been afraid for nearly two years that they will harm other human beings just by breathing?

Have they been afraid for two years that they might cause the deaths of grandparents and other elders by their presence in that life?

Have they feared they might kill their teachers if they don’t wear masks in school, or if they eat meals inside near the teacher?

Have they feared they could damage or kills their friends by playing with them in person at school, during recess, in hallways, in classrooms?

Have they feared that they themselves could be permanently maimed of killed by Covid 19?

The continuation of the email from the grandmother was heart breaking in its answer to some of these questions.  “My grandchildren are 4-year-old twins.  One of them told me on Facetime that  they can’t play with me or their own friends because they are ‘agents of death.’  I think they got that from a video game or cartoon or something—what they meant, though, was Covid.  I told them they are not agents of death, and I told my daughter to please let the kids come over—Grant and I have been vaccinated and boosted—but she said she couldn’t risk my health or her father’s because we are in our late sixties.  I asked her if the kids could at least go back to preschool, and she said she didn’t want them getting a long-haul case of Covid.”

This grandmother sees the fear.  She is asking the systems around her to stop being a nation afraid of its children, and to stop making them afraid of themselves.

 

Omicron Response in American Schooling

 

State by state, Covid is being handled differently.  Indeed, county by county and school by school.  Because Covid is now endemic—it will always be with us in some form, and it will harm adults and children as do the flu, cancer, accidents, homicides, and many other killers–we can understand it better than we did in March 2020.  We can especially understand children’s roles in it.  Our present moment is a risk/reward moment.  We have to decide if the risks of child isolation and social distancing are worth the reward we’ve assumed.

Let’s look at statistics.  In January 2022, Covid deaths for college age students was at zero and previous to that, it was at 1 in 5 million, according to Dr. Marty Makary, public policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, and author of The Price We Pay.  Deaths for the larger age group of 15 – 24-year-olds were .001% and nearly all those deaths were “in a very specific subgroup:  unvaccinated people with a medical comorbidity.”  Among children younger than 15, death rates are equally rare even among unvaccinated children.  The CDC at the end of 2021 puts child deaths from Covid at between .00% – 0.27% of all Covid deaths.  803 American children have died from Covid in the last two years.  That is less than from influenza in a typical year.  It is less than car accident, firearm, suicide, and other deaths for children.  Pediatric hospitalizations rise with each new strain of the disease, but still remain very low for children.  The average age of hospitalization for Covid is 72 years-old and the average age of a person dying from Covid is 80.

With these facts in mind, it is fair for us to ask why some school districts and buildings are being locked up again because of Omicron.  If Covid has taught us anything, it is the importance of schools, teachers, and mentors in school culture to child development–we don’t want to rob our children of these.  Meanwhile, many of the schools that are staying open in January 2022 require children to be constantly tested; to socially distance, to eat meals apart and outside in freezing temperatures, forgo recess and other socialization, play, bonding and learning; to wear masks in class, in the halls, on school buses, and to continue masking during strenuous athletics—this latter is uncomfortable at best, unhealthy at worst, but overall, a constant reminder to children that the American child is assumed by the larger culture to be a potential agent of death.

The dad who lamented the loss of his daughter’s sports’ activity lamented more than the loss of exercise; he lamented the lost nurturing, mentoring, bonding, skill-building, challenge, and resilience-building the sport will bring his daughter.  He lamented, too, he told me by phone, how his daughter is choosing “increased isolation through her devices.  She doesn’t spend much time with other people except on Snapchat and TikTok and she thinks this is socialization.  She thinks this is relationship.  Some kids don’t mind masks, but she has acne and hates the masks and just keeps isolating herself more and more.”

 

Four Crucial Areas of Focus

 

My goal in this new four essay series is not to critique a specific school or district’s approach to Covid 19.  Many schools still require constant masking, and I know that.   The CDC still recommends it, and many schools and state governments follow that advice.  My goal is to share a worry that millions of our children are experiencing fear constancy and a lack of resilience-development that is partially responsible for rewiring them in ways we do not want for our nation’s children.  While in this new series of essays, I will take you on a journey that focuses on childhood in America specifically (this is my country of origin and the one that I work in now predominantly) I hope my readers in other countries and cultures will see resonance:  while our cultures may differ in some ways, in the matter of child mental health, American problems are also problems elsewhere, and American errors and innovations do often translate well into other parts of the world, especially when they cut to the heart of the natural process of childhood.

In this first essay, I will help you engage specifically in mental health and resilience-building post-Covid (as Covid now becomes endemic) that address issues your children may be having in school and at home right now.

In the second essay, I will look at the nature of resilience-building in your child’s brain through the science of fear and the science of resilience–both can provide both short- and long-term insight toward decreasing unnecessary trauma in the brain itself.

In the third, I will look at nurture of resilience—specifically how we can change nurturing systems to invigorate resilience-building better than they do now and have done for about two decades.  I will suggest some strategies that might surprise you as counter to what has been taught via popular psychology for a while now.

In the fourth, I will look at American fear development and fragility at macro- and micro-levels of culture.  To change our nurturing systems toward child-resilience as a very high priority, we will need to change cultural attitudes that harm our children.

 

The Crisis in Child Mental Health Is Not New to Covid, But Perhaps Now We Can See It Better

 

The Jed Foundation, a non-profit devoted to suicide prevention, recently found that 31% of parents said their children’s mental health was worse in 2020 than before the pandemic.  The U.S. Surgeon General declared a mental health crisis in late 2020, revealing that one quarter of American children are experiencing depression symptoms and one fifth are diagnosed with anxiety.   Here is a piece of the Surgeon General’s declaration:  https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2021/12/10/surgeon-general-report-teen-suicide-attempts/.   Exemplifying rises in depression and anxiety, self-harm among girls has gone up 51% in the last two years.  Meanwhile, exemplifying the same, undermotivation, gaming and porn addiction, anhedonia, and school failure are all on the rise for boys.  Hidden inside the larger mental health statistics are developmental delay issues like those a recent study from Brown University (2021) found:  children born during Covid have “significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic” (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v1).

Confirming CDC reports and academic studies, UNICEF released its The State of the World’s Children 2021 promoting, protecting and caring for children’s mental health Report in late 2021, a comprehensive look at the mental health of children and adolescent not just during Covid but in the early 21st century.  UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore begins with Covid:  “It has been a long, long 18 months for all of us – especially children. With lockdowns and pandemic-related movement restrictions, children have spent indelible years of their lives away from family, friends, classrooms, play – key elements of childhood itself.  The impact is significant, and it is just the tip of the iceberg.”  Dr. Fore and the report then go beyond Covid to note:  “Even before the pandemic, far too many children were burdened under the weight of unaddressed mental health issues.  Children and young people carry the burden of mental health conditions without significant investment in addressing them.”

The American Pediatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the AMA, Embark, and numerous other clinical organizations have been similarly warning us about the child mental health crisis since the 1990s.  Rising childhood rates of anxiety and depressive disorders, suicide, post-traumatic stress, anhedonia, and violence have become disease functions with etiologies we have tracked since the early 1990s.  Physicians have been warning young parents for twenty years that the immune systems of children are not growing as they normally would because of excessive child protection from germs–this issue predated Covid but is amplified now, and adheres both to physical and mental health.   The child mental health landscape before the 1990s was somewhat different.

In the 70s, 80s, even early 90s, adolescent anxiety and depression rates were flat.  While child mental health was always a concern, and some children experienced significant brain disorders, it was not until the mid-1990s that Pew research began to show rates of mental illness and brain disorders jumping.  By the 20002, they were moving to the 1-in-5 rate and then to 1-in-4 rates we’ve seen among children and adolescents in the last decade.  Suicide, mentioned by the Surgeon General, is one of results of depressed child immunity–both physiologic and mental.  Among 10-to-24-year-olds, it has gone from a non-leading cause of death thirty years ago to the second leading cause (after car accidents) now.   Narcissistic, borderline, and schizoid personality disorders are rising, as are ADD/ADHD diagnoses, anorexia, bulimia, gender dysphoria, and violence.  All these disease and disorder rates are rising among our children and adults.  Some of the rise is because of better diagnosis and reporting than in the 1980s, but most is not.

 

The Fear/Fragility/Isolation/Despair Cycle

 

In his collection of stories and essays, Palm Sunday (1981), Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “the number one American killer is not cardiovascular disease, but loneliness.”  Forty years later, we better understand the science of loneliness, how it creates trauma in the brain, how hungry children are to be connected, yet how, despite constant “connection” via technology, our children feel less connected than ever before.   Loneliness attacks the brain, nervous system, immune system–it attacks body and soul.  Lonely children yearn for validation that they exist and, quite often, can never get enough of this validation, not even to survive.

A 14-year-old told me in November, 2018: “I think I am one of the girls you write about in your books.  I have everything I need, and my parents let me use any device I want, but I don’t really have friend-friends.  I have attempted suicide.  I’m on Zoloft now, and it helps some.  For a while I thought I was unhappy because maybe I am trans, but that’s not it.  Sometimes I just wish I wasn’t alive.”  I referred her to professionals in her area, and I made sure her parents knew what she had written me so they could get help for her.  I also discussed with her family the cycle of fearlessness and constancy resilience-building that had been unintentionally lost in her life.

To look at that cycle, I talked with her and her family about a particular neural loop in the brain:  fear/fragility/isolation/despair.   It is a rumination loop between that includes the amygdala (emotion-response part of the brain), the cingulate cortex (an attention/focus part of the brain), the hippocampus (the brain’s memory center), and other parts of the brain.  We can see the cycle, or loop, occur in four stages (I will help you track these in children around you in a moment).  This staged loop repeats itself internally.

1. Fear/anxiety grows–imposed from within or without (“You should be afraid” “I am afraid”).
2. Fragility/vigilance is amplified (“I am fragile and inadequate so I have to be constantly vigilant”).
3. Isolation/loneliness (“I must pull away from others to survive and thrive”)  Often, the child thinks, “but luckily I can connect with others via devices” not realizing that these relationships are “alternate reality: relationships”–not as real and healthy in the brain as we might think.
4. Depression/despair (“I still feel alone, sad, unhappy, I may now be addicted, I am unworthy, I am invalid, not real, I think I may not want to live”).

This loop is evident to many of us in the psychology field, though I am naming and listing it in the way I have just done based on a schema I use in my own private counseling practice.  Fortunately, most children do not get all the way to the despair that leads to suicide or homicide, but many children in this loop do get to the situational depression stage.

In these four essays I will make the argument that the four repeating stages in the loop have tentacles under the surface which we must look at carefully in American childhood, and cut off.

1. American society has exponentially increased the amount of fear, anxiety, and social isolation we provide to child development, both in our schools and institutions, and via devices.  This was true even before Covid but accelerated during Covid.
2. Simultaneously, American society has degraded parental and institutional methods of resilience-building in our children’s development.  I’ll explore with you in these four essays how this works–how the dual trend has become unfortunately solidified in American childhood and how we can change that.

At first glance, you can perhaps already see how our present Covid childhood reveals the dual trend.  Our children are inordinately and unnecessarily afraid of others and themselves; meanwhile, resilience building systems like schools are shut down or if still open, they mask and isolate children in other ways.  Our children experience significant fear without compensating relationships that build resilience because resilience is, in large part, built via constant relationships.  As we make our children afraid of themselves in the absence of significant threat to children we are distancing and isolating children against a huge mammoth charging towards them except that there is no huge mammoth charging towards them.  We make them afraid but meanwhile remove significant relational tools for their safe and healthy maturation.

Were our children avatars in a video game we might say to them, “By constantly increasing childhood fear and anxiety simultaneous to decreasing your opportunities to develop relationship and resilience, we give you an enemy invasion with very little armor, shield, or sword by which to protect yourself and your brain growth.”  In the metaphor of the diamond:  for the development of their moral character and mature sense of self-worth, we should provide children with diamonds of resilience but, instead, we provide jewels that dissolve when displayed or touched.  Our children become increasingly fragile, and they cycle through fear, fragility, hypervigilance, isolation, and then depression or anxiety disorders.

The 14-year-old girl who wrote me talked about constantly changing her appearance, age, and identity to fit who she thought other groups might like her to be in that moment online, even to the point of wondering over her own sex and gender identity as a way of trying to belong.  It was clear she did not have confidence-of-being, thus she was frightened of responses from her peers, no matter how she altered herself to fit what she thought her peers wanted.  She lived in constant fear of not only others but of her own generalized and—she felt despairingly—permanently inadequate self.

But she could master Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, she could project images quite well–this mastery created an illusion of confidence-of-being as it increased isolation; isolated, she felt increased fear and negativity bias (domination in the brain by negative thoughts) and became more anxious and felt more despair.

This girl’s internal brain development exemplifies the long term issue in American childhood.  Before Covid, girls like her and boys, parents, and many others wrote me similar emails about devices, social media, and the dangerous alternate reality loop they can create.  Facebook and Instagram have now acknowledged the danger.   Psychologist Jean Twenge pointed out in Igen (2017) that children have always been afraid of things and sought out identities and selves, but they did not do so with access to a pervasive fear mechanism our children have now–their device dependency.  What was happening to childhood via devices and tech before Covid has become even more endemic and amplified in the Covid years.  Screen time has become time itself for children.

Let’s remember:  childhoods lived previous to the prevalence of tech transpired in person–children and adults saw, touched, played with, learned-with other children and adults in person.  They developed self-regulation and resilience by co-regulating (being in proximate and interactive physical and emotional relationship) with many others.  They developed, boundaries, impulse-control, self-regulation and success and happiness via touch attachment, including seeing and touching each other’s faces and bodies in hugs and play, and reading facial and social cues intimately.  A child worked through fears of not being “acceptable” in the real world by doing what it took to become acceptable on the one end and/or by altering the child’s own resilience-development to include not caring about others’ standards of acceptability at the other.   Because children were socialized with others, they were less afraid, had fewer behavior problems, were less lonely and isolated, were less depressed, experienced less despair and suicide.

In child dependency of alternate or false reality environments such as the one the girl described, the child and adolescent lives in constant fear-stimulation and negativity bias.  Isaac Asimov previewed this pervasive fear development linked to technology use in the 1960s when he wrote about children becoming like particles lost in quantum flux, without anchor in their own developmental reality.   If your child plays excessive video games (gaming on school nights–a practice exacerbated by Covid childhood), you may see him forming a false internal reward system, then the gradually becoming undermotivated elsewhere; his brain’s reward and dopamine system is not being built in the real world, it gradually loses or does not develop resilience.  If your nine-year-old owns a smart phone (Smartphones have been given at even younger ages during Covid) you might see fear and fragility within days or weeks, then isolation and depression within months or a year.

 

Assessing Resilience-Based Childhood and Fear-Constancy Childhood

 

To ground your own study of these issues to the children in your life,  create a journal in your computer or by hand that allows you to become a citizen scientist.  Through the journal, observe and study your children and the children around you.  Record:

1. If and how your child (or another) is afraid–track both the surface fears (the fears the child voices aloud, perhaps) and the hidden fears that you suspect are operative in negativity biases in your child.
2. If and how he child is being confirmed in fragility and gradually feeling more fragile.
3. If and how the child is self-isolating or being forced to socially isolate in every day life.
4. If and how the child is less motivated, more depressed, anxious, or mentally distressed now than two or three years ago.

As you study your child, add:  If and how your child is experiencing a lack of development of the child’s mental health immune system.   Study this immune system by asking:  in what ways is my child not as resilient as I would like him/her to be?   By asking you to complete this exercise daily, over a one-month period, I am asking you to test out what experts are seeing.  Once you have specific information regarding the children around you,  reach out to other parents and professionals around you to see what they are seeing in their children.  In at least one in five cases, you may find other parents, educators, and caregivers are as concerned as you are about the state of childhood in America.  If you are a teacher or school administrator like those I quoted earlier, I hope you will discuss the fear/fragility/isolation/despair cycle on parent education nights and via other mechanisms.  A rate of 1-in-4 or 1-in-5 children with anxiety, depression, or other mental illness is itself a pandemic-type event for a culture.

 

The First Major Change We Must Make in American Childhood:  Ending Childhood Covid Fear

 

In each of the four essays I will discuss steps I believe our nation must take to build a stronger base of resilience development for our children.  The first step is to end Covid fear-constancy among children.  Ending this will help end the entrenched negativity bias and hypervigilance that accompanies constant fear.  I hope the statistics in this essay are helping you to say, “Okay, Covid is endemic, let’s get vaccinated, but let’s not live in a fear-crisis anymore.”  For data supportive of this approach, please see my blogs with key word “Covid” in the www.gurianinstitute.com website’s “News” page.  The Great Barrington Declaration is another asset you can find via Google.  In it, more than 10,000 epidemiologists, virologists, and physicians have confirmed the data and the new approach.  And the New York Times just reported (“Covid’s Risk to Older Adults,” January 5, 2022), an average 75 year old is now as likely to die of Covid as the flu (1 in 200 chance), a textbook definition of endemic disease.

Please know:  I am not suggesting irresponsible approaches to Covid, nor an end to all mitigation measures in schools.   I am 63, vaccinated and boosted; personally, too, I have lived with the pain, grief, and loss of Covid–my father, 92, contracted Covid in his skilled nursing facility in July 2021 and co-morbid with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, died of Covid pneumonia five days later. We were very close, and this was a huge loss.   I have colleagues and friends in hospitals and urgent care centers who are overwhelmed with unvaccinated Covid patients.  I have friends and colleagues in school systems overwhelmed with staff shortages.  I know that Covid is a serious disease and there is complexity in all our systems right now, complexity local authorities need to work through with local wisdom.  I also know Covid could mutate into something more dangerous to children than it is now.

At the same time, I cannot forget my father’s words in 2020 and 2021:  “Why are we isolating and locking children up??  Yes, maybe some older people’s lives might be saved, but look what we’re doing to our children.”  A retired sociologist, he read the data and saw the child mental health tragedy building.  “Adults are supposed to sacrifice themselves for children,” he said, “not the other way around.”  As you complete the exercise and gather data and information, I hope you will be moved to change Covid fear–whether as parent or professional–with these new messages to children:

1. As a child who is vaccinated, you will generally carry a very small viral load of Covid 19 (should you even contract the virus), thus, unless you have a significant comorbidity, you do not have to be afraid of the virus or severe illness or death like you have been these last two years.
2. Even if you are not vaccinated or boosted, you will generally fit this same category:  unless you have a significant co-morbidity, you will generally carry a small viral load of Covid 19 if you contract the virus, thus you do not have to be afraid of the virus or severe illness or death as you have been.
3. The adults around you (unless they have a significant comorbidity) do not have to be afraid of Covid 19 like they have been for two years because they are now vaccinated—this means if they contract the virus, even if from you, they will most likely carry a small viral load, which keeps them safe from significant illness or death.
4. If some adults around you are un-vaccinated, they have made that choice for themselves; you are not responsible for that choice, nor would most of them want you, a child, to be held responsible, thus, their choice is still not good enough reason to add to your childhood fears, worries over fragility, and social isolation.
5. If you have a loved one, relative, friend, or other close person around you who has a significantly compromised immune system or co-morbidity–for example, cancer–it is responsible for you to please ask them what kind of isolation, masking, or other mitigation measure they would like you to use around them.

These messages should help you, your local schools and neighborhoods to back away from an elderly/adult fear-based approach to a more child-focused/child mental health-based approach to Covid 19; to join with the large group of scientists asking our nation to realize prioritize child mental health now.  And even if you disagree with my assessment of the Covid situation altogether, I hope you’ll at least agree that our children’s mental health crisis is linked, in some ways, to the cycle I have described, and a more child-centered priority can help our children.   This may well mean looking at the fact that adults can congregate in bars, restaurants, and sporting events without masks but children, who are less likely to spread the virus, are forced to wear masks in schools.  Our children are far more restricted than most adults today–something we simply must look at carefully going forward.  Wherever you are on these issues, no matter party or political position, I hope you will advocate now for our children to hug a teacher again who wants to be hugged, play sports without masks, eat together indoors at school, talk and debate boisterously with or without a mask, enjoy close-in rough and tumble play on playgrounds without masks–and going forward, come out from behind computer screens and closed doors to love the world again and be loved by it:  a first crucial step in improving child mental health.