Children of the Lockdown: The Bill Comes Due
At some point during 2020, wealthy adults decided that children would make excellent shock absorbers for our fears, our politics, and our institutional liability management. We closed their schools, confined them to screens, masked their faces, and then acted surprised when test scores collapsed, and mental health visits surged.
I write this as a father. My oldest son missed his graduation, senior prom, and final track season, milestones no Zoom call can recreate, before going on to graduate from West Point. My youngest became withdrawn when sports seasons were cancelled, and neighboring parents refused to let their children play outside. I watched his personality change in real time. That is not an abstraction. That is a real cost.
The costs of the lockdowns are no longer theoretical. National assessments show the largest decline in reading scores for nine-year-olds since the 1970s and the first-ever recorded decline in math for that age group. The Brookings Institution estimates that learning loss will reduce average lifetime earnings for affected students by six percent. The Wharton School projects U.S. GDP will be 1.4 percent lower by 2051 than it would have been absent these disruptions. We traded real, long-run prosperity for the short-run feeling of doing something.
FOIA emails obtained by Americans for Public Trust in February 2021 revealed that AFT President Randi Weingarten and her staff were operating as 'thought partners' to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, proposing language for school reopening guidance that was adopted nearly verbatim - including trigger provisions to shut schools and remote work carve-outs - after reviewing draft guidance before its public release. The AFT acknowledged the collaboration; the CDC called it standard stakeholder practice. What it was not, by any reasonable definition, was the government following science independent of union preferences. When private and Catholic schools reopened, often serving lower-income families with fewer remote options, public school systems in major cities remained shuttered while union leadership offered explanations that evolved with impressive flexibility as the evidence increasingly failed to support extended closures. The exodus to homeschooling and private enrollment was a verdict.
California Mayor Eric Garcetti declared 'snitching is saving lives' while Governor Newsom dined maskless at the French Laundry and dispatched the Sheriff to arrest a lone paddleboarder in Malibu - surfing in open water, without a mask, in direct sunlight, where UVB radiation reduces the virus's half-life to one to two minutes compared with eighteen indoors. The six-foot social distancing rule originated not from SARS-CoV-2 research but from 1930s-1950s influenza droplet studies; former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb acknowledged in 2021 it lacked Covid-specific grounding. Cloth masks filter ten to thirty percent of aerosols under real-world conditions; the landmark Bangladesh RCT found that even tripling compliance to 42 percent produced only a 12 percent reduction in symptomatic infection for surgical masks. Meanwhile, churches were shuttered, gyms were padlocked, and gun stores were closed, while marijuana dispensaries and liquor stores were deemed essential. One is not required to oppose legal cannabis to find this hierarchy of values worth examining.
The American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in children's mental health in October 2021. Mental health-related emergency department visits among adolescents surged above 2019 baselines and remained elevated. Schools are not merely venues for algebra; they are nodes of social life and early detection. Zoom is impressively bad at spotting a depressed fourteen-year-old who keeps their camera off.
Abigail Shrier's Bad Therapy (2024) documents a parallel crisis: Gen Z's mental health is worse than any prior generation despite dramatically expanded access to therapy and school-based counseling. Nearly forty percent of Gen Z have received mental health treatment, versus twenty-six percent of Gen Xers. More intervention has produced more pathology, what Shrier calls the 'treatment prevalence paradox.' Before expanding school-based programs with current federal funding, we should require the same evidentiary standards we apply to pharmaceutical interventions.
Between 2020 and 2023, adolescents identifying as transgender or nonbinary increased by an estimated two to five times the pre-pandemic baseline. Shrier's Irreversible Damage (2020), named Best Book of the Year by both The Economist and The Times of London, documented a pre-existing social contagion pattern among adolescent girls. The pandemic's concentrated social isolation, anxiety, and identity disruption make it worth asking – empirically, not politically – whether the mental health crisis and the identity spike are related phenomena. The fact that asking the question has become socially hazardous is itself a data point.
Schools must be designated essential infrastructure, closed only with compelling, proportionate evidence - codified in state law rather than left to union negotiators. Evidence points to high-dosage tutoring and extended instructional time: the Wharton model estimates a one-month school year extension would have yielded a trillion-dollar GDP gain, fifteen dollars for every dollar invested. Mental health programs must meet evidentiary standards, not just scale. And the organizations that advocated loudest for extended closures and have subsequently avoided any reckoning with outcomes should be encouraged - firmly, with the full weight of electoral consequences - to reconsider their self-assessments.
The children of the lockdown will live with the consequences long after the last emergency order is archived, and the officials who issued it have moved on. The adults who made those decisions should be required to give an account for their actions.
