The effect on children is enormous.
My husband and I have a son who’s 11, who’s
here with us in our quarantine that we’re living in.
And I’m very much struck by the fact that
the continuity of my friendships or of my
husband’s lies, to a large extent, in verbal
communication.
And so, if we’re able to see and talk to
our friends on Zoom and elsewhere, we can
more or less feel that we’re keeping in touch.
The fabric of children’s friendships is
in doing things together.
And so, children who are deprived of the ability
to do things together don’t have that much
to say to one another when they call one another,
and so their friendships themselves lose some
of their fabric and substance.
And the children are therefore missing not
only some of the educational opportunities
of school, but also the social situation of
school.
And I think if we do this for a year, and
my son, who was 10 when we started, ends up
being nearly 12 by the time that we’re finished,
what are the modes of development that he
will have missed?
Now, in addition to that, children are not
stupid, and they can understand that this
situation is unnatural and bizarre.
Some children are able to put a good face
on it; some children aren’t.
It’s an enormous stress on them to recognize
this.
And the biggest stress on the children often
is the condition of their parents.
There was an experiment done, a study done,
some years ago, in which a researcher named
Myrna Weissman tried to determine what the
best way was to treat childhood depression.
And after trying 15 different things in a
very large controlled study, the thing that
was most effective in helping children was
to treat their mothers.
And so, the mental illness of parents bleeds
over into the mental illness of children.
Even just the stress and distress of parents
bleeds over into the condition of children.
And now with this news that the disease may
in fact be fatal for children or may make
them very, very sick, contrary to what we
previously heard, we have to isolate our children
more, and we have to take more precautions.
And we’re less likely to get back to school
and less likely to go back to anything like
what our children had come to experience as
normal life.
And that’s a very toxic situation psychologically,
as well as an anxiety-producing one physically.
