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Children are affected by more than the classroom

A Houghton Middle School class listens to their teacher during the first day of class in September. Schools are struggling to help students who are battling mental health issues as well as assignment load issues. (Photo by Garrett Neese, Houghton Daily Mining Gazette)

HOUGHTON — The repeated COVID-19-related school shutdowns that began in March 2020, have not only negatively impacted some students in several ways, from mental health to failing grades, they have also shone a spotlight on an issue that parents and teachers have known, but had not always been willing to admit, for years: the education system is failing the children.

A December 2020 article in The Atlantic Magazine titled: “School wasn’t so great before COVID, either,” written by Erika Christakis, points out that the “pandemic has revealed long-standing inattention to children’s developmental needs-needs as basic as exercise, outdoor time, conversation, play, even sleep.”

Micah Stipech, counselor at Houghton Elementary School, said that a number of these issues were plaguing children years before the pandemic.

“The obvious, one big factor, for me, is the lack of social (interaction),” said Stipech. “That’s something that is a protracted factor that keeps people healthy: being around other people.

“When we’re deprived of it, it hurts for most people.”

That is especially true for lower elementary school students, he added. Learning through social interaction with other children is just as valuable as the academics.

Leah Campbell, author of “How COVID-19 could affect kids’ long-term social development,” published on healthline.com on April 3, 2020, quoted Amy Learmonth, Ph.D., developmental psychologist who has studied children as young as 8 weeks old, as saying: “Social development has important impacts at all ages, but for the purposes of social distancing, the kids who are likely to suffer the most are in late childhood and adolescence.”

Isolation has also affected students in another way.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in November 2020 that, beginning in April 2020, the proportion of children’s mental health-related emergency department visits among all pediatric E.D. visits increased, and remained elevated through October. Compared with 2019, the proportion of mental health-related visits for children aged 5-11 and 12-17 years increased approximately 24% and 31%, respectively. The bottom line? The COVID-19 pandemic is taking a significant toll on children’s mental health. Mental health issues, especially anxiety, fear and depression, often manifest in physical ailments, as Stipech has seen in students in Houghton.

“Kids are (experiencing) upset stomachs and headaches; psycho schematic symptoms of upset stomachs; what appears like a school phobia, but what is really just their mechanism — is avoidance — which is wired in us to perceive and avoid danger,” said Stipech. “They’ve got fear built up, and often it’s misplaced, or not accurate.”

The current social and political divisiveness throughout the United States is also negatively impacting children.

Stipech said he too often hears lower grade students discussing the divisive issues most often heard on the news or discussed among parents.

“I’d rather hear their stories about deer camp, or how their hockey team did on the weekend, but instead you’ll hear stuff that maybe they’ve heard from the news or their parents. Each situation is different: the void is filled with something. For me, screens — I’m doing some virtual testing that requires some of our students to come in right now, and they haven’t seen kids in a year — some of them.”

Under the current circumstances, Stipech said, people, he thinks, are doing the best they can.

“Specifically, the parents and teachers: it really is piling up on them, and we have the choice of dealing with adversity through adaptivity,” said Stipech. “Some of the other things I teach kids, other than the anxiety management, is to focus on gratitude, or what are your strengths? Develop those things we can focus on, other than if we just focus on the anxiety piece.

“Adults really do model that for our young people, because we’re not really going to know what the effects are for a while. We’re going to see it over time.”

Stipech returned again to the three issues he sees as the most significant needs for children: social behavior, exercise and physical movement, getting outside, screen time, and nutrition. He used the example of recent events on a kindergarten child.

“We’ve only been full-day kindergarten for six or seven years, and now we know they need, developmentally, at least four recesses a day,” he said. “Part of Finland’s model is (that) every hour they have 10 minutes of unstructured play and that’s part of their recipe.

“But now, the Cohort Model is the best model to keep us in school, and keeping you around a group. So, now we have kids who are not going out for recess in the morning, they’re at a desk. For a while, their gym and art and everything was coming to the classroom. Now, that we’ve been able to go to the gym. They are having indoor recess, or lunch in their classrooms, and so you have a 6-year-old boy, and somebody wants to label him with ADD, and give him a pill. I want to scream, ‘No.’ They’re doing exactly what I would expect. They’re struggling. It’s hard for them. They’re not wired to spend hours in a classroom, at a desk, engaging with academics.”

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