San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
For class of 2023, COVID is all that it has known
Six soon-to-be graduates discuss what it is like to go through all of high school during a pandemic
They had just a single semester of “normal” high school under their belt freshman year when, one Friday in March 2020, they went home after school and didn’t go back for nearly two years.
Now, these COVID high schoolers are coming of age.
They’ve been through Zoom school, masked school, unmasked school, dodging every variant in between — as they were forced to familiarize themselves with the march of the Greek alphabet, from alpha to omicron. And it will end in just a few short months.
These kids will graduate into adulthood at a progress-reversing moment in American history, where forced birth and measles both are making comebacks. Record-setting fires have taught these kids to check the air quality index on their weather app before heading outside, as the climate crisis continues unabated, leaving them with the possibility of no future at all.
As a doctor, I have found it impossible not to focus on and fret about these young people, their mental health and its implications as they graduate from high school. I have long thought with relief, “Thank goodness I didn’t have to come of age during this time.”
Last October, major pediatric organizations declared a “national state of emergency” in children’s mental health. This October, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended routine anxiety screening in all children over 8 years old due to the unprecedented mental health crisis young people are facing. And just this month, a study found signs of premature aging in teenage brains — a response to the stress and anxiety of the pandemic.
Many of us in the fields of medicine and education know that the kids are not OK. But does the COVID class of 2023 see itself this way, as victims — made worse by the failure that was, and continues to be, our public health response to a global pandemic?
I wonder if they feel cheated out of the small victories and mundane normal milestones of adolescence, with their skipped sophomore school dances and delayed driver’s licenses. To what extent are they aware of what they missed, what they have been robbed of ?
So I asked them.
Over a meal at a burger place, my 17-year-old nephew and five of his friends graciously allowed me to look back with them at their high school experiences and what their futures look like after their chaotic adolescence. They chomped on burgers and slurped on shakes and dipped their fries and ribbed each other. For a moment, it all felt so normal that I thought my read on these kids was entirely wrong.
In the end, it kind of was, and it kind of wasn’t. They were a mixed bag of scathed and unscathed, with some thriving sprinkled in.
All of the members of the lunch crew came from families where going to a four-year college is a foregone conclusion. They all go to a large, relatively well-funded public school; these were not kids from the demographics hardest hit by COVID. Yet they were not immune to the challenges and horrors of this time. They lost a fellow student to suicide this spring and weeks later a mass shooting was averted at their school. Just this fall, they lost two fellow students to gun violence.
Like everyone, the pandemic shaped them and left its imprint.
As we began to speak, they immediately sorted themselves into personality types — two of the boys considered themselves introverts, two extroverts and the two others fell somewhere in between. The two extroverts openly expressed that they had a marked decline in their mental health once COVID lockdowns began.
“At the end of first semester freshman year, I had amazing grades,” one began, “but by the end of the year, I had zero motivation. It was a low point in mental health for me.”
The other self-identified extrovert agreed: “I mean, you were on Zoom all the time, you had Zoom over here, Minecraft over here,” he said as he pantomimed looking at multiple computer screens. “School just became something to be feared, something negative.”
All of this was made worse in the context of not socializing, not seeing each other. At some point early in the remote school year, the extroverts noted, everyone turned their cameras off and teachers disabled the chat functions so there was absolutely no ability to directly connect with other students in their classes. That’s when things were at their worst.
On the flip side, the introverts gushed about how much they thrived during the pandemic. “It was great,” one told me unapologetically. “Honestly, I had so much time. I started a business I still have.”
“Now registered with the state of California,” his friend interjected.
The business was selling “Magic the Gathering” game cards.
“I did a lot during the pandemic,” the introverted entrepreneur marveled. “I made a lot of money and learned a lot over that time.”
The quieter of the introverts, meanwhile, a future music major, beamed as he shared that at the beginning of the pandemic he “listened to two albums a day every day for a month.”
“One thing for me which is not the case for most people is that I think that I actually felt better,” he said. “I actually got decently better over the course of quarantine and into junior year.”
When a friend asked what he meant — what he had been going through previously — he replied, “I was coming out of a two-year slump. I was just … sad.”
I asked what he felt the pandemic had given him. “Introspection,” he said. Reveling in months of uninterrupted time actually helped him get over his pre-pandemic slump.
The extroverts reacted immediately. “A new amount of time for introspection was actually harmful,” one said. The other agreed: “I went way down more than I’ve ever been before in my life, sophomore year.”
They blamed too much extra time without the ability to socialize as the primary factor in their unprecedented mental health struggles. When pressed about that difficult time, one declined to elaborate further. “I’m not going to go into that.”
I marveled at what was unfolding in front of me. These teen boys, speaking honestly with each other about their emotions and struggles, were open enough to be vulnerable in front of their peers, but also had boundaries firm enough to curate what they did and didn’t feel comfortable sharing. It felt rare, refreshing and healthy in a way I did not anticipate.
I asked them whether they felt robbed because of the pandemic. I was surprised to hear that most of them didn’t think that way because “everyone went through it” — the pandemic as the great equalizer. One student, however, who envisioned a future at the Air Force Academy, said he felt robbed of academic rigor and of earning potential. He described the shutdown and how long it lasted as “generational warfare.” He was vocally critical of his teachers, of the politicians, of all the chaos that everyone had to endure. In spite of this, somehow, he said that during the pandemic, “I learned optimism.”
He felt that the emphasis on saving lives — even through shutdowns — showed, compared to past times, “that as a society, we are so much better. It’s so much nicer to live now than any other time in history.” His friends chimed in, in agreement.
This left me stunned. There was a price extracted from these teens during COVID that’s hard to quantify. And yet, they could still appreciate that the sacrifices they made were a measure of how decent, how humane a time they lived in.
It was a far cry from the tragicfigure narrative arc I had conjured up for them.
These were no victims. These were a group of boys, on the cusp of adulthood, who could speak honestly about their struggles, their emotional landscapes and do so with care and respect. And though perhaps they suffered losses in the academic rigor of say, their honors math class, it was clear that something was gained.
The future music major stated emphatically, “I think now is the best time in human history. The world is still f— up, but it is the best it’s ever been.”
Who was I to argue with the COVID class of 2023?