In December 2022, the scientific journal Biological Psychiatry published a study that compared adolescent brain scans before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Teenagers scanned after the pandemic showed reduced cortical thickness, larger hippocampal and amygdala volume, and greater brain aging than those scanned before COVID.
This kind of adolescent brain development, the study noted, was typically associated with “exposure to early life adversity, including violence, neglect, and family dysfunction.” The post-COVID scans showed something new. “As a result of social isolation and distancing during the shutdown,” the study concludes, “virtually all youth experienced adversity in the form of significant departures from their normal routines.”
Early into the COVID-19 outbreak, it was clear that unless somebody was immunocompromised, age was the primary determinant in the risk of severe health complications from the virus, yet for many policymakers, the country needed a one-size-fits-all solution, with no regard to individual circumstances. Prudent policy for a seventy-year-old with respiratory problems, the thinking went, was equally necessary for a healthy family of eight.
The efficacy of masking and isolation mandates remains a matter of controversy, but their unintended consequences are becoming increasingly clear, as more studies come out documenting the harmful effects they had on childhood development.
In 2022, the journal Frontiers in Psychology published an article exploring the implications of masks on infants. “Human faces convey critical information for the development of social cognition,” the authors explained, but “with masks, the facial cues available to the infant are impoverished.” Other studies have documented the consequences. Columbia University researchers found that “babies born during the pandemic showed reduced motor and social-emotional development compared to pre-pandemic babies,” for example, and the medical journal Contemporary Pediatrics reported that pediatric speech disorders more than doubled.
The deleterious effects of isolation mandates on schoolchildren were made visible by a viral photograph of French preschoolers sitting alone in chalk squares during playtime. Numerous studies have since confirmed that children exhibited increased rates of depression, anxiety, and indignation due to the lockdowns. The CDC reported that mental-health related emergency room visits for adolescents had increased by more than thirty percent between 2019 and 2020. Other students have documented the dramatic spike in teenage substance abuse as a coping mechanism while in isolation.
We are still discovering the damage that masking and lockdown mandates subjected children to, which provides a bleak lesson about the dangers of replacing individual autonomy with one-size-fits-all policies in times of crisis. Can you trust even the most expert bureaucrat to design policies that are appropriate for the unique circumstances of your household, or does it make more sense to make your own decisions about what’s best for you and your family?
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