COVID, Quarantine and Kids
By Camilla Garrison
At the Meeting Street School in Providence, RI Pre-K teachers are noticing signs of developmental delays in their four to five year old students because of being quarantined during the COVID-19 pandemic. This year's Pre-K class was born in 2020 or 2021 which means they were still infants or toddlers towards the end of quarantine. Last year's Pre-K class was a little older, which means they had been in a very important developmental stage: one or two, so they were learning to walk or talk. That class had about 15 students and six of them required speech language therapy. This is because when the children were learning to talk, everyone was wearing masks covering their mouths and stopping little kids from learning to speak. Speech therapists tried to wear clear masks in order for students to watch their lips during mandated masking in schools, but all that did was make a fogged up mask. That class is now in kindergarten.
This year's Pre-K class is presenting different behavioral patterns. Their teacher says that her students are (politely) “socially and emotionally immature” “They just don't know how to make a friend.” She has also observed their lack of fine motor skills. After teaching preschool for many years she knows, or did know, exactly what kinds of things children of a certain age are capable of. This year's class was significantly different. They did many crafts and couldn't figure out how to assemble a paper snowman, draw shapes, or create hand-print turkeys at Thanksgiving time. Pictures made out of felt scraps came out looking like colorful blobs when previous classes could create intricate smiley faces and appendages. The teacher hypothesizes that this class has weak hands, leading to a lack of fine motor skills potentially caused by not doing normal kid things like going to the playground, learning monkey bars, and climbing trees. Instead, young children were inside being entertained by iPads and other touch screens instead of scribbling or playing blocks. I believe this may have been potentially caused by their stressed parents who were definitely not acting normal around their very impressionable kids.
Another effect of quarantine on kids was that some students who had an IEP or other diagnosis weren't actually diagnosed until much later. Hospitals and doctor's offices were full and not admitting patients for evaluations, which were not a priority.
When the Pre-K children returned to school in 2021 or 2022, masks were a joke. The school staff tried and failed to enforce masks with the kids, but getting a four year old to keep a mask on all day is exactly as difficult as you might think. I was told that some kids would pull down their face masks to sneeze and then and then replace it after they were done. When asked why she was doing that, one girl replied, “I don't want to get my mask dirty.” This was happening with many students, and the masks actually were not so cleanly after all. They were so dirty in fact, that one student, after finishing lunch was trying to find their mask, actually picked up a mask off the floor, sniffed it and said, “nope that one's not mine.” So masking was a fail. That class ended up keeping their masks in their cubbies until they needed to leave the classroom to go outside with other kids, or go home.
Meanwhile, elsewhere at Meeting Street this year's fifth grade class was learning to read in Kindergarten. I spoke with her current homeroom teacher, and she's been noticing some similar characteristics just like in Pre-K. The preschoolers this year were born or 1 year old during quarantine and the 5th graders this year were five and six. Like Pre-K, today’s 5th graders are also showing signs of social and emotional delays. Their teacher believes the biggest impact is attention. Fifth and sixth graders cannot manage distractions. She notices this in her middle school ELA (English Language Arts) classes and thinks it was probably derived from a different kind of education: Distance Learning. When she was teaching 5th grade ELA over Zoom, students would show up late, not turn on their cameras, eat and lounge around while they're supposed to be working, and were very distracted by what was going on in the house. There was nothing she could do about this because her students were in fact, at home, in bed. When the fifth graders were returning to in-person school she found that they were very tired after relaxing for months and that socializing and physically learning was exhausting.
This year’s class she has noticed that social anxiety is one of the most prominent issues. “A lot of them do have anxiety and are more nervous,” she says. Only the most outgoing of these 10 or 11 year olds are really thriving in social settings.
Now just after the five year mark of the beginning of COVID, we see certain behavioral characteristics and learning challenges in individual kids and don’t always know how to name it. This is really a much broader pattern that one can only see when you step back and look at many different ages and perspectives. After speaking with classroom teachers and students, I could really see the big picture: the effect that COVID quarantine has had on children. Once you’ve read this, hopefully you will see it too and are able to identify these effects.