Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Chicago Sun-Times via AP
A preschool student listens as her teacher talks during class at Dawes Elementary School in Chicago, January 11, 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic.
Kids have suffered during the coronavirus pandemic in ways whose long-term effects are only starting to become evident. And the reliance on screen time, whether for distance learning or for babysitting, has only worsened things.
I am no fan of standardized testing. But as a gross measure, tests can tell you how well children are learning. According to results of national exams released last week, between 2019 and 2022, students in fourth and eighth grade experienced unprecedented declines in math and reduced reading achievement.
Schools and teachers have been whipsawed between concerns for the health of students and teachers and the need to devise some reasonable form of pedagogy. Teachers also suffered. That’s why they are leaving the profession in droves.
A more subtle cost has been on the socialization of young children. Kids born just before the pandemic are now three and four years old, and starting to attend preschool. The results are not pretty.
During the pandemic, young children stayed home with parents or grandparents or paid babysitters. They arrive at preschool with no experience of social interaction with other kids, either for play or for learning.
A member of my extended family, who is a gifted Montessori teacher, told me, “Some children have never been in a classroom or even group play. Often the child will push, shove, or tug another child to initiate play. This behavior does not entice another child to play.”
Masks, still worn in lots of preschools, have set back both children’s acquisition of speech and the reading of social cues from other children and teachers. Some kids exposed to peers for the first time cry inconsolably when they don’t get their way.
This teacher came up with the device of a “crying chair,” both to reduce disruption and to break the pattern. “OK, if you want to keep crying, we have a crying chair,” the teacher would say kindly. “You can sit in it as long as you like.” Eventually, the child does get tired of crying, but still lacks emotional knowledge of how to re-engage with the group, for either play or learning.
A factor that has exacerbated all of these problems is the ubiquity of commercially motivated screen time directed at very small children. Harassed parents relied on this during the pandemic even more than before.
As Susan Linn, psychologist and founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, writes in her superb recent book, Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children, commercially designed and motivated screen time increases social isolation and undermines a child’s innate capacity for play based on the child’s own imagination. Kids who cultivate this capacity are better able to relate to other children and adults, and to learn.
As we dig out from the effects of the pandemic, we will need to invest more in preschools, restore the capacity of schools to make classrooms welcoming places for teachers as well as students, and regulate Big Tech to cease treating kids as profit centers and invading their imaginations. That’s no small set of challenges.
