I'm less inclined to draw broad generational generalizations but it's probably fair to say that a lot of things would have played out differently in a pre-mainstream Internet era.
I don't agree with the implication that using Internet and smartphones make people asocial. If anything, I bet those techs helped people feel less isolated than they'd have felt without them.
This seems like one of those occasions where there'd be an "of course" for either result. Sort of an "absence makes the heart grow fonder"/"out of sight, out of mind" situation.
Leave it to an old person to yell about technology ruining people while denying the simple science that some people might feel differently about socialization than others.
And leave it to a young person to welcome any change as progress, and see technology not as a tool, but as a good in itself.
>while denying the simple science that some people might feel differently about socialization than others.
Yeah, It certainly is just "differently", can't be worse. That's why depression is sky high among the youngs, loneliness and isolation is reported as having rocketed, and so on (and that's already pre covid).
I'm a young fellow and I would generally agree with you. I'm sick of the rejection of people's opinions because they're "old" (aka more experienced). Beginning to take the advice and views of my elders seriously is what I think has helped make me so much more happy in my day to day life. I feel like I've been able to skip over many of the troubles my peers face.
And yet you've managed not to see any change any outgoingness, loneliness, time spent on screen, etc., in students and teenagers, despite those being registered in all kinds of studies and polls? Heck, even the sex has been going down...
Now, even though 2003 is already after the start cutoff date (a first major development being the web's post-1994 huge adoption), the contrast between it and say 2013 (in between which dates smartphones and social media were widely available) would already releal huge changes in those aspects.
Except if the changes became invisible even to someone in contact with students in a kind of "boiling the frog" incremental familiarity (where it had been slowly but steadily increasing each year, but the infra-year difference didn't seem important).
Except that one of the data points was that kids who were in full-time school were happier, so it's probably got to do with home life. Full-time school + more parents/siblings at home.
> In fact, an almost identical number of students fell into each of the three categories: their mental wellbeing had improved; there had been no change; or they had experienced a deterioration to their wellbeing.
This feels like a red flag on the conclusions.
How does this compare to a normal time period? I wouldn’t be surprised if the random ups and downs of growing up normally resulted in a distribution where 1/3 of students claim they felt happier, 1/3 of students claimed they felt the same, and 1/3 of students felt worse than the prior year.
Journalists are so desperate to publish hot takes on COVID that we’ve forgotten that people’s lives normally change over time.
> How does this compare to a normal time period? I wouldn’t be surprised if the random ups and downs of growing up normally resulted in a distribution where 1/3 of students claim they felt happier, 1/3 of students claimed they felt the same, and 1/3 of students felt worse than the prior year.
This sounds to me like a distinction without a difference. In both cases, the net result would be approximately 0 effect on the overall mental health of the population being studied.
> This sounds to me like a distinction without a difference. In both cases, the net result would be approximately 0 effect on the overall mental health of the population being studied.
I believe OP is saying that the underlying assumption here is that students do not get happier during their time during university without lockdown.
If for instance 2/3 students left university happier than when they started pre-lockdown/covid, this would need to be accounted for in any study to make it meaningful.
My take is that this is a counterpoint to the dominant media narrative that covid and lockdowns have been detrimental to the mental heath of nearly every child, usually based on anecdata. So even if these results _aren't_ different from a normal year, that's still meaningful.
I think this is the crux of their conclusions too:
> While the pandemic has undoubtedly had negative consequences for many, it is important to keep in mind that this is not the case for all children and young people.
> In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents aged 12–17 years, especially girls. During February 21–March 20, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6% higher among girls aged 12–17 years than during the same period in 2019.
How did that play out over the rest of the pandemic, though? May 2020 was early in the pandemic, and there was a lot of turmoil. But things did settle down pretty quickly into a new normal for a lot of us.
Alternative headline: "Lockdowns allowed for parents to keep a closer eye on their kids, as a result more suicide attempts were discovered during the pandemic. Actual suicides (and thus attempts) did not increase significantly."
According to this source[1] 1 in 25 attempts in youth are successful vs 1 in 4 for the elderly. That leaves a lot of room for "attempt discovery" statistics to meaningfully change without any meaningful changes in actual attempts.
And it's not just true for children. The narrative from the media has been overwhelmingly "Stay-at-home has been bad for everyone! Nobody is happier! Everyone wants to get back to normal." Almost zero recognition that for some people it's been bad, for some, not much of a change, and for some, it's been a very positive experience.
Sure, some have pointed out that billionaires have gotten better off, but that's a non-story--when has that not been true?
The pandemic started towards the end of my masters and beyond the initial “oh shit” moment, I actually found it way better than I expected because for the first time in my life it was not weird for me to just stay at home, enjoy my own company and reduce socializing by a factor of 5 or more.
Now when I actually have to interact with people it’s in a low enough volume that it’s enjoyable and not the crapshoot it used to be: OK or ordeal depending on the day.
I can relate. During my studies I often felt like I ought to make the most of having people around. So much is made of the opportunity to meet people at uni, it feels odd to waste it.
With a lockdown I think I'd be just fine at home or in a student hall, putting the most into studying.
Having just started an online masters, I've noticed that socialization can bias strongly towards "Purposeful" socialization e.g. A slack channel for discussing the class/assignments.
Compared to my undergrad there were many times I think I just sat around drinking/watching movies because there was a social group doing it. I wonder if the lack of purpose in such activities grinds on students over time.
Yeah I think for some people, the lockdowns really opened their eyes that a simple life spent mostly at home can be enjoyable, and something they want to continue. Of course for some others, who thrive on activity and a lot of social interaction, the lockdowns were miserable.
Among my peers, there's a pretty big split between people who have a social life outside of work, and people who don't. The folks who have a family, especially, see time spent commuting as a detriment to both work and family. For those highly social coworkers, the lockdown (and enduring resistance to commuting) has been a big negative.
I think I would have enjoyed pandemic a lot more if I was not married or had kids. It was nice to get out of so many boring social obligations. I tried to play more video games, caught up on various shows, picked up new hobbies, creatively socialized like hiking, or meeting outdoors.
But a few weeks in my wife got really depressed, she didn't want to do anything but complain about lockdowns. I spent rest of next two years trying to cheer her up. It was exhausting. So finally I gave up on social distancing guidelines and we started to socialize like normal. But for some reason she continues to complain about lockdowns, covid, etc. I am spending all my energy cheering her.
Not sure if this was really because of the pandemic but for me the last 3 years have been life changing in a positive way. A feeling of "not beeing the only one feeling lonely sometimes" I think helped for sure.
Ugh... 'happier' is a strong conclusion.If I had to guess the actual effect probably is something along the lines of people having more time for themselves, taking a break from society, and realizing they're stressed for no reason most of the time.
This is not to say that the lockdown made anybody happier.I'm willing to bet the causal factor is the fact that people experienced a little bit of isolation, "me-time", took a break from the daily noise(especially the majority of people who spend too much time on social media).
I want to see the more in-depth numbers: how many of those who reportedly stated that they felt happier during lockdown were using social media and/or were 'over-socializing' to the point that their own happiness was tied to other people's expectations?
So 1 in 3 felt happier, 1 in 3 felt more depressed, and the remaining 1 in 3 felt no major change.
Sounds pretty much like a normal (gaussian) distribution, or basically a non-story. Guessing if they measured satisfaction on a scale, the majority were clustered near the "no major change" camp, as with any gaussian curve. As we already know, it turns out humans can adapt to things.
By phrasing the headline result as "1 in 3 felt happier," it creates a narrative where there likely isn't one. You imagine the 33% were this solid block of people feeling much happier. But, re: the gaussian distribution, its likely very few were at the extremes, and most were clustered towards the middle.
Textbook clickbait. It invites you to react with your emotional, anecdotal feelings about what this means to you, as if there was any interesting finding there.
The article contextualizes itself at the beginning. A large number of people believe the effect of the lockdowns on children was not a normal distribution but was skewed negative. So a normal distribution is news. This does not discount your argument that emphasizing the positive side of the distribution is clickbait, but if it is positioning itself as emphasizing that positive side to a population who thinks it is all negative, then I think it’s fine.
For me textbook clickbait is an article that does not substantiate the promise of the headline, or one that comically exaggerates the excitement of the information in the article. There are people who believe the lockdowns were wholly an atrocity on children, and this article substantiates a counterbalance without going all the way (after all, the headline itself tells you that 2/3 children were unaffected or negatively affected).
> The highest proportions of students who reported improved mental wellbeing were among those who were in school every day (39%) and most days (35%), while the highest proportion of students who reported worse wellbeing were those who attended just once or twice (39%).
Seems that it absolutely skews negative for the kids who had to deal with more lockdowns, i.e. not going to school with their peers.
> So a normal distribution is news.
I don't see anywhere in the article where they claim it's a normal distribution? OP was just speculating IIUC.
> Seems that it absolutely skews negative for the kids who had to deal with more lockdowns, i.e. not going to school with their peers.
That's incorrect.
If you look at Figure-1 from [the article](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00787-021-01934-z ), it appears that students were happier when they attended either "Not at all" or "Every day". It's the middle-ground options that averaged out to show lower-satisfaction.
Or to frame it differently, students who never went to school in-person reported a net-positive average: 33.5% better vs. 32.7% worse (vs. 33.8% the same). That doesn't support the notion that students didn't like staying home.
That said, I'd warn against over-interpreting such small differences.
---
Separately, if we did want to speculate based on the data: we might guess that it was about consistency.
Students appeared to be happiest when they attended not-all-all or every-day, with lower improvements in middle-ground options.
Comparing the two extremes, there is a preference for every-day over not-at-all (stressing that we're talking about smaller figures here), but even that might be explainable in terms of consistency: because, before the pandemic, students did attend every-day -- so not-at-all was a major shift in lifestyle for those students, i.e. a major inconsistency.
Hypothetically, if students always attended online, but then some had to start attending in-person every-day, we might see the reverse bias, as then it'd be the students who'd have to attend having the major shift in lifestyle.
---
All that said, there appear to be more underlying factors.
For example, if we look at Table 2, it appears that there was a more considerable gender-gap:
* males were happier (2400 vs. 1836);
* females weren't (3185 vs. 3861).
That's a large enough relative-disparity as to suggest that it may be a mistake to interpret the data in a gender-blind way; the little on-average differences seem overshadowed by the gender-differences.
When data was reviewed, the effect in suicides among school age children was that it was significantly lower despite anti-lockdown spokespeople claiming it was higher. The shocking thing was that thisj was not even close in the data.
I used to believe the same things, that politicians followed the general will of their potential voters. I don't anymore, and reading some Chomsky made me understand how the system works. "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" is suggested reading, with the caveat that it opens the readers eyes to a harrowing reality and that what has been seen cannot be unseen.
Agreed, once you read that book (or watch the documentary [0]) it sets you down a new path of understanding. However, you will feel alternatively annoyed or horrified every day of the rest of your life.
That's an ideal world, but we don't live in an ideal world. Politicians do things not just to get reelected, but also to build their own wealth and power. To say that they only care about being reelected is a gross and inaccurate simplification.
When kids can’t socialize normally with their peers that is negative for them, even if kids themselves might be happy with “homeschooling” and socializing with their friends in Minecraft.
We have been spared most lockdown measures, but had a couple of weeks with closed schools and day care. It was fine, but my kids were absolutely better of once schools and day care opened again.
I'm not following why if kids are happy homeschooling and socializing on popular video games is a negative?
If your kids experienced only a month of lockdowns returning to normal would make them absolutely better. What if you were locked down for the entire year or two? After your kids get use to it they might respond differently.
> I'm not following why if kids are happy homeschooling and socializing on popular video games is a negative?
Many kids, including our three, would be perfectly happy if they didn't have to do any schoolwork ever again.
During the worst lockdown period here our middle child got 45 mins "online" with his teacher each day, and apart from that, he was on his own. Two working parents, with two (allegedly) full-time jobs. As the saying goes, "do the math"...
Far too much TV was watched. Far too much youtube too. Far too much Minecraft was played.
For the kids this was Just Fine(!) For us parents, not so much.
By the time kids are old enough that suicide starts to become a serious risk (6th grade and up, mostly) I'd need to see some serious data to convince me that socializing at school isn't net-harmful. In fact I'm surprised rates might have dropped, because kids were still able to socialize over the Internet. But, possibly, that gave them more ability to avoid the worst of it, and that was enough to make a difference.
It's really, really hard for kids to avoid a handful of super-toxic students in their class, when in person. Your options are much more limited than an adult's are under similar circumstances.
It's really, really hard for kids to avoid a handful of super-toxic students in their class,
Avoiding everyone is not the best solution to that. It's a part of growing up to be able to deal with people of all ilks. Living in a bubble is not healthy.
I have plenty of anecdotal evidence of suicides and depression in lockdown.
Numbers like x% better are meaningless without a base rate and this article is guilty of presenting numbers in that way.
It's dangerous talk, so the author should be more responsible IMHO, or it indicative of the author not caring.
Higher or lower against the base rate, this article will likely be quoted incorrectly and foster myths.
School has been extremely negative for me, because I did not socialize with anyone there. School easily makes it into the top 10 of harmful things in my life
I would follow Dr Tyler Black, https://twitter.com/tylerblack32 for data on that.
He reviews data (with source links) from multiple sources and provides interpretations, and imho a pretty good job of breaking down nuances in the data, how it is grouped and summarized vs the ground conditions.
The CDC data was reviewed by him on this thread. This is perhaps the simplest summary:
Edit:
There is actually an interesting presentation of data on this and other school mental health impacts on a even more macro basis in the Urgency of Equity website data packet which tries to provide a scientifically backed set of recommendations for schools going forward on Covid. It is biased to taking more specific actions than the anti-vax/anti-mask crowd, and even the current Covid policies of many governments.
And even outside of the specific school scheme, looking at overall rates of child suicide in the US and Canada, the rates aren't out of variance from historical trends vs during covid years.
(see pg 25 for the graphs on the Urgency of Equity packet).
I don't have kids or anything more than an academic interest, but from what I gathered, "hybrid/remote" involved the most brain-dead approach to learning environments possible. It seems/seemed like they just looked at the most popular videoconferencing options and used them as designed. From what I read, that did not provide a very good classroom simulation, and classroom simulations was the only option sought.
It was awful for our kids in middle / high school. 6 hours a day of zoom meetings with cameras required to be on at all times was exactly as bad in every way as you can imagine.
Come on. Would you really have predicted, before a massive two-year pandemic, that it would have a mean-zero random impact on people's well-being? Let's keep ourselves honest here.
I thought it was a well recognized fact that humans adapt--I remember this even from my old high school psych class.
There's been a thousand studies about this (becoming a refugee, poverty vs. being rich, etc etc).
For most people, the only thing that has the power to permanently change your mental state is the death of someone very close to you (a spouse, child, etc) or forced exile from an identity forming social tie (eg. divorce, getting fired)
Are you kidding? Of all the possible consequences from completely changing the daily life of people "no overall change on happiness" was the least plausible one.
There's been rising awareness that researchers refrain from publishing neutral or "boring" results, this is a real problem because it skews the expectations not only of researchers but also the general public.
So, for me this is not a non-story and, in fact, somewhat unexpected. I'm hoping it'll trigger more in-depth research into what made those 33% happier. Some of the reasons are obvious but I suspect there's more nuance.
It’s also a survey, which is largely useless in the discovery of real information. Whereas in my county, ER visits for teen attempted suicides are up over 100% from pre-Covid. That seems more like actual evidence that something is wrong here
> Sounds pretty much like a normal (gaussian) distribution, or basically a non-story.
Depends on your perspective I think. Where I live (Sweden) the general sentiment was that young people would kill themselves in droves if there was a lockdown. So here this should be news, I’d say.
A negative event doesn't cause a normal distribution like that. When a hurricane floods a city a third of the citizens don't feel happy about it. The story is the fact there is a normal distribution, thus prompting an examination of why a massive restriction of movement wasn't a purely negative event.
I don't think this is the right take. I'm going to venture that pretty much everyone thinks it was worse than this, i.e. that the more young people feel depressed than happier in COVID-time. So "it's actually on average no effect" very much is a "story", it would be something that would cause most people to substantially update their models of the world if it's sound research.
Put differently, "1 in 3 young people felt depressed" isn't surprising at all. "1 in 3 young people felt happier" is surprising to me. So leading with the surprising bit makes sense for a lede.
All of this is meta-level, I have no opinion on the object-level validity of the research.
> So 1 in 3 felt happier, 1 in 3 felt more depressed, and the remaining 1 in 3 felt no major change.
>
> Sounds pretty much like a normal (gaussian) distribution, or basically a non-story.
For a Gaussian, I would have expected 1 felt worse, 6 felt the same and 1 felt better. The current numbers sound more like an uniform distribution.
> Guessing if they measured satisfaction on a scale, the majority were clustered near the "no major change" camp, as with any gaussian curve.
They did measure satisfaction on a scale. From page four of the report:
> Students responded on a sliding scale of 0–100 with five labelled categories,
‘Much worse’, ‘Slightly worse’, ‘The same’, ‘Slightly better’, and ‘Much better’, anchored at scores 0, 25, 50, 75, and 100, respectively. We simplified the scale in this analysis by transforming it into groups of those doing ‘worse’ (scores 0–37.5 on the sliding scale), ‘the same’ (scores 37.6–62.5), or ‘better’
(scores 62.6–100) (N.B. categories are not evenly divided due to how the scale is presented in the survey; please see https://osf.io/fpbt3/ for an example of the survey scales).
Fitting a normal distribution with 1/3 of the volume in the 37.6–62.5 range ends up with 1/5 of respondents above the "Slightly better" mark (i.e. above 75).
> The common narrative that the pandemic has had overwhelmingly negative effects on the lives of children and young people might not tell the full story [-Emma Soneson]
They appear to be arguing against that narrative rather than for the opposite.
I mean, I wouldn't expect the distribution to be normal. It would also be interesting if the headline was "1 in 3 young people say they don't mind getting run over by a truck". You'd think things which are generally viewed as negative would tend towards a biased distribution, so if that's not the case I'm interested.
For the first lockdown I think I would have gone neutral - there was a certain novelty factor that made it kind of interesting - my friends all banded on Discord, everyday experiences were new, and kind exciting in a weird way. The third lockdown (late 2020 - Apr 2021) was one of the worst experiences I can remember, probably the lowest I've been in the last decade.
The 'first national lockdown' is key I think - the first one was fairly novel, you got a break from school/work in some cases, more time with the kids, you felt safe. It was (for me at least) the second and third that really hurt mentally, because you wondered when it was ever going to end.
> Ms Soneson and colleagues explored this issue using the OxWell Student Survey, a large, school-based survey of students aged eight to 18 years living in England. More than 17,000 students took part in the June/July 2020 survey,
A lot of people have spoken about the negative effects on children of lockdowns, social isolation and so forth. I'm glad to see a study pointing to the positives. Why? Because for a lot of people high school (in particular) is absolutely horrible normally.
In the US in particular we have a culture where bullying is tolerated ("boys will be boys", "toughen up") and the victims of bullying are treated like potential mass shooters.
It's actually like there is a systemic acceptance that some children will be chewed up and spit out for the social benefit of others. If that's not a microcosm of US culture I don't know what is.
Another finding comes to mine: girls tend to do better in same-sex schools. Boys tend to do better in mixed-sex schools. Again this seems like tacit acceptance that many of us are OK with girls being "expendable" for male student outcomes.
One upside of the pandemic is that it's challenged a lot of norms, such as having to be in the office. Likewise, the worker shortage we have now is probably the best thing for worker rights in the last 50 years.
While I don't doubt that bullying is tolerated in a lot of schools in the US, my son was recently physically bullied and the administration was very quick in setting up opportunities for natural intervention (doing so in a way that didn't single him out even further as weak or a snitch).
In addition, your statement that girls are being treated as expendable to promote male outcomes flies in the face of the clear evidence that the current US educational system favors girls over boys -- heavily by 8th grade (https://ed.stanford.edu/news/new-stanford-education-study-sh...). _Why_ this is happening is not super clear, but the current system is certainly not throwing girls under the bus to improve outcomes for boys.
If there is one thing I have learned its that my own self reporting on my happiness is extremely variable and unreliable. Someone could have asked me at many periods during the last few years if I was happy and I might have reported I was but I know for a fact that deep down my mental health was taking a tole even if I didn't notice it at the time. So yeah, self reported mental health status should probably be looked at with a skeptical eye.
lockdown made me more depressed than ever. I had a breakup right before the lockdown and ended up overdosing on MDMA right at the start of it in april 2020. Overall haven't been able to recover emotionally or physically but I did get a better job that pays better than any job i've ever had. Eventually moved back in with my parents because it seemed pointless to live in a tiny new york appartment all alone and pay high rent. Now i feel stuck and I'm not sure where to go. I was thinking of traveling in south america because the time zones are the same. I've been feeling like life is kinda pointless. It's just the same thing on repeat everyday. It seems like the pandemic is never going away and we just have to adapt as a species.
Things seem bleak in america. Everyone is isolated. There's a housing crisis, a climate crisis, war and supply chain shortages everywhere.
Not sure what the point of this comment is, just wanted to vent.
I should feel happier than ever because of my new job but I've been depressed ever since my ex blocked me. I emailed her daily for about a year but she never responded so i stopped.
Sorry to hear that man. It sounds like you’re young-ish. Time heals, even though it sucks right now, and life has a way of sending someone else down your way and you can make each other happy.. Best of luck friend
Get out of your parent's house. It is a daily reminder that you're not facing life as an adult.
You don't have to go to an expensive city. If you are working remotely you can live anywhere and there are plenty of nice towns where housing is not insanely expensive.
Join a gym or a hiking club or something to get some physical activity and maybe meet some new friends.
> Get out of your parent's house. It is a daily reminder that you're not facing life as an adult.
This is complete bullshit. The US is a major outlier with the societal pressure to move out for no reason. It makes for poor family connections, wasted money, and wasted resources in general.
This is a big unsubstantiated implication you're making here. I fully agree that there is too much of a stigma against living with your family (though it has improved greatly over the past 10-15 years as surveys and studies have shown) in the US, but there are plenty of reasons to move out. This is coming from someone, by the way, who was convinced he'd probably stay living at home until 30 or so. I eventually realized it was holding me back.
Yes, relatively speaking it cost me a ton of money to move out, and I'd have a lot more money in my bank account right now if I didn't, but none of that money was "wasted" and I wouldn't trade it for anything or go back and do anything differently. It changed my life immensely, for the better.
I love my family but no matter how much you love your family there is no substitute for having a place of your own, and having the freedom and privacy to live your life the way you like, operate under your own rules, under your preferred hours, etc.
You're right, many people may not be ready for this, and living at home shouldn't be stigmatized - though perhaps parents who don't raise children who are ready for it at a reasonable age should be stigmatized.
But if you are gainfully employed and you have no mental conditions where being out on your own should affect you negatively, then moving out on your own is absolutely not a waste.
> The US is a major outlier
Despite all of its faults, the US is a major outlier in most things... in a good way. Yes, other countries and cultures may do things differently. But the individualist nature of the US is the keystone to what makes this country so great.
It sounds like you just had relationship issues with your family and “solved them” by moving out. Just because you got mad there were house rules doesn’t mean house rules hold everyone back.
Billions of adults get by fine otherwise around the globe without moving out until they have children and even then moving out isn’t a given. It frequently just changes to the child owning a house and having the parents live in.
> But the individualist nature of
Pushing for strong families does not imply an emphasis on collectivism at the government levels.
Looking back, lockdowns sucked in the moment. But when I look at it in aggregate, my life improved dramatically. A big part of that was prior to the pandemic I would hit the clubs and bars every weekend. With bars and clubs closed I was forced to do other things, like go outside to nature.
After a while the clubs re-opened but I realized I was no longer drawn to go to. My life on the weekends started to revolve around going outdoors rather than getting smashed. Eventually I made the biggest change and moved to Colorado to persue more outdoors.
If the pandemic never happened I would probably still be living in the city going to bars and clubs. So while there are many negative things about the past two years, for me it ended in a net positive.
Definitely a bit of dejavu here - I'm getting ready to do the same thing and had a very similar experience during the pandemic. I no longer really like doing crowded loud social things, just seems constructed and unhealthy (maybe I'm just feeling old in my late 20's?). Decided to axe my NYC lease and move to CO.
I was just talking about this yesterday, I got burned by what would have been pre-pandemic, a normal night out. I imagine there are a lot of people who lost that casual tolerance and aren't really willing to rebuilt it
Yep. Every two months I drive my mother to a medical appointment not far from where my office is (officially; the building we work in is closing for good). By the time I get back home I'm thinking "I used to do this every day, I'm so glad I don't any more..."
Let's repeat that survey, across all age groups, and for the current month. I'm especially curious what the eponymous "granny" has to say about it. I'm also very curious to hear what parents have to say about their kids being herded to a screens-only life at absurdly young ages. I know this was already happening, but it has been vastly accelerated. I can only hope this means we will get to the natural maxima and swing back the other way sooner.
Well if they're 8 to 18, then a sizeable number of them were having to go to school otherwise. In other words, one in three prefer staying home to going to school. The only surprise is that it's not higher.
schools are constant social pressure, comparing yourself, and feeling inadequate. no wonder so many kids felt relief , ignorance is a bliss while you are young at least. But i m afraid they will invent new stupid games with online tools too.
During lockdown, my wife and I left Manhattan to stay with my parents in the suburbs temporarily, and so did my sister. We thought it was going to be a couple weeks, and it turned into 3 months. I really enjoyed having the whole family together. We ate dinner together every night, cooked for each other, went on walks. Of course we got in each others way sometimes. But overall I do miss that time, and wish it was possible for our family to live like that.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadYou said it. Including before covid.
>while denying the simple science that some people might feel differently about socialization than others.
Yeah, It certainly is just "differently", can't be worse. That's why depression is sky high among the youngs, loneliness and isolation is reported as having rocketed, and so on (and that's already pre covid).
Well, since it works out so well for them...
Don't know what kind of students you're thinking about - I can't imagine anyone more intensely social than a group of freshers?
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/teens-spend-hours-screens-entertai...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/02/nearly-four-...
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/01/6065885...
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/campus-life-why-are-student...
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/20/lonelin...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/13/young-a...
[5] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Now, even though 2003 is already after the start cutoff date (a first major development being the web's post-1994 huge adoption), the contrast between it and say 2013 (in between which dates smartphones and social media were widely available) would already releal huge changes in those aspects.
Except if the changes became invisible even to someone in contact with students in a kind of "boiling the frog" incremental familiarity (where it had been slowly but steadily increasing each year, but the infra-year difference didn't seem important).
This feels like a red flag on the conclusions.
How does this compare to a normal time period? I wouldn’t be surprised if the random ups and downs of growing up normally resulted in a distribution where 1/3 of students claim they felt happier, 1/3 of students claimed they felt the same, and 1/3 of students felt worse than the prior year.
Journalists are so desperate to publish hot takes on COVID that we’ve forgotten that people’s lives normally change over time.
This sounds to me like a distinction without a difference. In both cases, the net result would be approximately 0 effect on the overall mental health of the population being studied.
I believe OP is saying that the underlying assumption here is that students do not get happier during their time during university without lockdown.
If for instance 2/3 students left university happier than when they started pre-lockdown/covid, this would need to be accounted for in any study to make it meaningful.
I think this is the crux of their conclusions too:
> While the pandemic has undoubtedly had negative consequences for many, it is important to keep in mind that this is not the case for all children and young people.
> In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents aged 12–17 years, especially girls. During February 21–March 20, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6% higher among girls aged 12–17 years than during the same period in 2019.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm
According to this source[1] 1 in 25 attempts in youth are successful vs 1 in 4 for the elderly. That leaves a lot of room for "attempt discovery" statistics to meaningfully change without any meaningful changes in actual attempts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_attempt#:~:text=The%20....
Sure, some have pointed out that billionaires have gotten better off, but that's a non-story--when has that not been true?
Now when I actually have to interact with people it’s in a low enough volume that it’s enjoyable and not the crapshoot it used to be: OK or ordeal depending on the day.
With a lockdown I think I'd be just fine at home or in a student hall, putting the most into studying.
Compared to my undergrad there were many times I think I just sat around drinking/watching movies because there was a social group doing it. I wonder if the lack of purpose in such activities grinds on students over time.
But a few weeks in my wife got really depressed, she didn't want to do anything but complain about lockdowns. I spent rest of next two years trying to cheer her up. It was exhausting. So finally I gave up on social distancing guidelines and we started to socialize like normal. But for some reason she continues to complain about lockdowns, covid, etc. I am spending all my energy cheering her.
This is not to say that the lockdown made anybody happier.I'm willing to bet the causal factor is the fact that people experienced a little bit of isolation, "me-time", took a break from the daily noise(especially the majority of people who spend too much time on social media).
I want to see the more in-depth numbers: how many of those who reportedly stated that they felt happier during lockdown were using social media and/or were 'over-socializing' to the point that their own happiness was tied to other people's expectations?
Sounds pretty much like a normal (gaussian) distribution, or basically a non-story. Guessing if they measured satisfaction on a scale, the majority were clustered near the "no major change" camp, as with any gaussian curve. As we already know, it turns out humans can adapt to things.
By phrasing the headline result as "1 in 3 felt happier," it creates a narrative where there likely isn't one. You imagine the 33% were this solid block of people feeling much happier. But, re: the gaussian distribution, its likely very few were at the extremes, and most were clustered towards the middle.
Textbook clickbait. It invites you to react with your emotional, anecdotal feelings about what this means to you, as if there was any interesting finding there.
For me textbook clickbait is an article that does not substantiate the promise of the headline, or one that comically exaggerates the excitement of the information in the article. There are people who believe the lockdowns were wholly an atrocity on children, and this article substantiates a counterbalance without going all the way (after all, the headline itself tells you that 2/3 children were unaffected or negatively affected).
Seems that it absolutely skews negative for the kids who had to deal with more lockdowns, i.e. not going to school with their peers.
> So a normal distribution is news.
I don't see anywhere in the article where they claim it's a normal distribution? OP was just speculating IIUC.
That's incorrect.
If you look at Figure-1 from [the article](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00787-021-01934-z ), it appears that students were happier when they attended either "Not at all" or "Every day". It's the middle-ground options that averaged out to show lower-satisfaction.
Or to frame it differently, students who never went to school in-person reported a net-positive average: 33.5% better vs. 32.7% worse (vs. 33.8% the same). That doesn't support the notion that students didn't like staying home.
That said, I'd warn against over-interpreting such small differences.
---
Separately, if we did want to speculate based on the data: we might guess that it was about consistency.
Students appeared to be happiest when they attended not-all-all or every-day, with lower improvements in middle-ground options.
Comparing the two extremes, there is a preference for every-day over not-at-all (stressing that we're talking about smaller figures here), but even that might be explainable in terms of consistency: because, before the pandemic, students did attend every-day -- so not-at-all was a major shift in lifestyle for those students, i.e. a major inconsistency.
Hypothetically, if students always attended online, but then some had to start attending in-person every-day, we might see the reverse bias, as then it'd be the students who'd have to attend having the major shift in lifestyle.
---
All that said, there appear to be more underlying factors.
For example, if we look at Table 2, it appears that there was a more considerable gender-gap:
* males were happier (2400 vs. 1836);
* females weren't (3185 vs. 3861).
That's a large enough relative-disparity as to suggest that it may be a mistake to interpret the data in a gender-blind way; the little on-average differences seem overshadowed by the gender-differences.
At the same time, the media starts talking about how bad homeschooling and lockdowns are for kids mental health and suicide rates.
Consent is always manufactured.
I feel the need to intervene here. The only thing political leaders want... is to get reelected. That is there job. To get reelected.
Sure, in certain cases, a politician has kids and wants their kids back in school. But in this example the line should go:
Political leaders had constituents that wanted kids back in school, so the leaders worked to make that happen.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuwmWnphqII
We have been spared most lockdown measures, but had a couple of weeks with closed schools and day care. It was fine, but my kids were absolutely better of once schools and day care opened again.
If your kids experienced only a month of lockdowns returning to normal would make them absolutely better. What if you were locked down for the entire year or two? After your kids get use to it they might respond differently.
Many kids, including our three, would be perfectly happy if they didn't have to do any schoolwork ever again.
During the worst lockdown period here our middle child got 45 mins "online" with his teacher each day, and apart from that, he was on his own. Two working parents, with two (allegedly) full-time jobs. As the saying goes, "do the math"...
Far too much TV was watched. Far too much youtube too. Far too much Minecraft was played.
For the kids this was Just Fine(!) For us parents, not so much.
It's really, really hard for kids to avoid a handful of super-toxic students in their class, when in person. Your options are much more limited than an adult's are under similar circumstances.
Avoiding everyone is not the best solution to that. It's a part of growing up to be able to deal with people of all ilks. Living in a bubble is not healthy.
I have plenty of anecdotal evidence of suicides and depression in lockdown.
Numbers like x% better are meaningless without a base rate and this article is guilty of presenting numbers in that way. It's dangerous talk, so the author should be more responsible IMHO, or it indicative of the author not caring. Higher or lower against the base rate, this article will likely be quoted incorrectly and foster myths.
Everything I'm finding suggests they went up (the CDC "morbidity and mortality weekly report" indicated a 22% spike in 2020 relative to 2019).
The CDC data was reviewed by him on this thread. This is perhaps the simplest summary:
https://twitter.com/tylerblack32/status/1470785676316663820?...
Edit: There is actually an interesting presentation of data on this and other school mental health impacts on a even more macro basis in the Urgency of Equity website data packet which tries to provide a scientifically backed set of recommendations for schools going forward on Covid. It is biased to taking more specific actions than the anti-vax/anti-mask crowd, and even the current Covid policies of many governments.
http://urgencyofequity.org
Once Hybrid/Remote started, suicides worse, implying worse than baseline. But slightly within error bars for most.
So order of good > bad: No School > In-Person school > Hybrid
(see pg 25 for the graphs on the Urgency of Equity packet).
There's been a thousand studies about this (becoming a refugee, poverty vs. being rich, etc etc).
For most people, the only thing that has the power to permanently change your mental state is the death of someone very close to you (a spouse, child, etc) or forced exile from an identity forming social tie (eg. divorce, getting fired)
Are you kidding? Of all the possible consequences from completely changing the daily life of people "no overall change on happiness" was the least plausible one.
So, for me this is not a non-story and, in fact, somewhat unexpected. I'm hoping it'll trigger more in-depth research into what made those 33% happier. Some of the reasons are obvious but I suspect there's more nuance.
Depends on your perspective I think. Where I live (Sweden) the general sentiment was that young people would kill themselves in droves if there was a lockdown. So here this should be news, I’d say.
I don't think this is the right take. I'm going to venture that pretty much everyone thinks it was worse than this, i.e. that the more young people feel depressed than happier in COVID-time. So "it's actually on average no effect" very much is a "story", it would be something that would cause most people to substantially update their models of the world if it's sound research.
Put differently, "1 in 3 young people felt depressed" isn't surprising at all. "1 in 3 young people felt happier" is surprising to me. So leading with the surprising bit makes sense for a lede.
All of this is meta-level, I have no opinion on the object-level validity of the research.
For a Gaussian, I would have expected 1 felt worse, 6 felt the same and 1 felt better. The current numbers sound more like an uniform distribution.
If your interpretation is correct, this means the center of the distribution is "neutral", but it could very well not be the case.
They did measure satisfaction on a scale. From page four of the report:
> Students responded on a sliding scale of 0–100 with five labelled categories, ‘Much worse’, ‘Slightly worse’, ‘The same’, ‘Slightly better’, and ‘Much better’, anchored at scores 0, 25, 50, 75, and 100, respectively. We simplified the scale in this analysis by transforming it into groups of those doing ‘worse’ (scores 0–37.5 on the sliding scale), ‘the same’ (scores 37.6–62.5), or ‘better’ (scores 62.6–100) (N.B. categories are not evenly divided due to how the scale is presented in the survey; please see https://osf.io/fpbt3/ for an example of the survey scales).
Fitting a normal distribution with 1/3 of the volume in the 37.6–62.5 range ends up with 1/5 of respondents above the "Slightly better" mark (i.e. above 75).
> The common narrative that the pandemic has had overwhelmingly negative effects on the lives of children and young people might not tell the full story [-Emma Soneson]
They appear to be arguing against that narrative rather than for the opposite.
Also their “data” is two years old:
> More than 17,000 students took part in the June/July 2020 survey, during the tail end of the first national lockdown
Think the young people might report feeling different now?
> Ms Soneson and colleagues explored this issue using the OxWell Student Survey, a large, school-based survey of students aged eight to 18 years living in England. More than 17,000 students took part in the June/July 2020 survey,
A lot of people have spoken about the negative effects on children of lockdowns, social isolation and so forth. I'm glad to see a study pointing to the positives. Why? Because for a lot of people high school (in particular) is absolutely horrible normally.
In the US in particular we have a culture where bullying is tolerated ("boys will be boys", "toughen up") and the victims of bullying are treated like potential mass shooters.
It's actually like there is a systemic acceptance that some children will be chewed up and spit out for the social benefit of others. If that's not a microcosm of US culture I don't know what is.
Another finding comes to mine: girls tend to do better in same-sex schools. Boys tend to do better in mixed-sex schools. Again this seems like tacit acceptance that many of us are OK with girls being "expendable" for male student outcomes.
One upside of the pandemic is that it's challenged a lot of norms, such as having to be in the office. Likewise, the worker shortage we have now is probably the best thing for worker rights in the last 50 years.
In addition, your statement that girls are being treated as expendable to promote male outcomes flies in the face of the clear evidence that the current US educational system favors girls over boys -- heavily by 8th grade (https://ed.stanford.edu/news/new-stanford-education-study-sh...). _Why_ this is happening is not super clear, but the current system is certainly not throwing girls under the bus to improve outcomes for boys.
Things seem bleak in america. Everyone is isolated. There's a housing crisis, a climate crisis, war and supply chain shortages everywhere.
Not sure what the point of this comment is, just wanted to vent.
I should feel happier than ever because of my new job but I've been depressed ever since my ex blocked me. I emailed her daily for about a year but she never responded so i stopped.
You don't have to go to an expensive city. If you are working remotely you can live anywhere and there are plenty of nice towns where housing is not insanely expensive.
Join a gym or a hiking club or something to get some physical activity and maybe meet some new friends.
This is complete bullshit. The US is a major outlier with the societal pressure to move out for no reason. It makes for poor family connections, wasted money, and wasted resources in general.
This is a big unsubstantiated implication you're making here. I fully agree that there is too much of a stigma against living with your family (though it has improved greatly over the past 10-15 years as surveys and studies have shown) in the US, but there are plenty of reasons to move out. This is coming from someone, by the way, who was convinced he'd probably stay living at home until 30 or so. I eventually realized it was holding me back.
Yes, relatively speaking it cost me a ton of money to move out, and I'd have a lot more money in my bank account right now if I didn't, but none of that money was "wasted" and I wouldn't trade it for anything or go back and do anything differently. It changed my life immensely, for the better.
I love my family but no matter how much you love your family there is no substitute for having a place of your own, and having the freedom and privacy to live your life the way you like, operate under your own rules, under your preferred hours, etc.
You're right, many people may not be ready for this, and living at home shouldn't be stigmatized - though perhaps parents who don't raise children who are ready for it at a reasonable age should be stigmatized.
But if you are gainfully employed and you have no mental conditions where being out on your own should affect you negatively, then moving out on your own is absolutely not a waste.
> The US is a major outlier
Despite all of its faults, the US is a major outlier in most things... in a good way. Yes, other countries and cultures may do things differently. But the individualist nature of the US is the keystone to what makes this country so great.
Billions of adults get by fine otherwise around the globe without moving out until they have children and even then moving out isn’t a given. It frequently just changes to the child owning a house and having the parents live in.
> But the individualist nature of
Pushing for strong families does not imply an emphasis on collectivism at the government levels.
After a while the clubs re-opened but I realized I was no longer drawn to go to. My life on the weekends started to revolve around going outdoors rather than getting smashed. Eventually I made the biggest change and moved to Colorado to persue more outdoors.
If the pandemic never happened I would probably still be living in the city going to bars and clubs. So while there are many negative things about the past two years, for me it ended in a net positive.
We are fickle, easy to forget. One day stuck in traffic or in a crowded bus/metro is enough to make you count your blessings. Speaking about WFH.