‘So many kids were sad before this’ - The Washington Post

‘So many kids were sad before this’ - The Washington Post

‘So many kids were sad before this’

We are hearing increasingly about how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the mental health of young people.

But as T. Elijah Hawkes, a veteran public school principal, explains in this post, it is important to remember that many of them weren’t doing well even before the crisis.

Hawkes is the author of the recently published book “School for the Age of Upheaval: Classrooms that Get Personal, Get Political, and Get to Work,” and was the founding principal of the James Baldwin School in New York.

His writings about adolescence, public school and democracy have appeared in numerous publications, and he has written two previous books, “The New Teacher Book” and “Rethinking Sexism, Gender and Sexuality.” You can follow him on Twitter @ElijahHawkes.

By T. Elijah Hawkes

I got the call in the middle of the afternoon. Schools had been closed for about a month. I’m sure some school principals got the call sooner, others not yet. A student was in the hospital, and it wasn’t the virus; it was a suicide attempt.

I knew the call would come because so many kids were sad before this. The social isolation and family stress of the covid-19 emergency are exacerbating what was already a crisis of youth sadness.

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Earlier this year, not long before school closure, I remember a week when three students from my central Vermont school were in emergency rooms waiting for beds at facilities for adolescents in crisis.

The suicidal ideation we see in some children is an extreme, felt by a small but increasing minority. Varying degrees of hopelessness, however, are felt by many. Recent statistics are astounding.

In 2019, 40 percent of girls in my state reported prolonged feelings of sadness or hopelessness, so much so that daily routines of life were interrupted, according to the Vermont Youth Risk Behavior Survey. This was an 18-point increase over 2017. CONTINUE READING: ‘So many kids were sad before this’ - The Washington Post