Lessons to learn from COVID effects on kids

No one wants to relive the COVID pandemic of the past two and a half years. Masks, distancing, testing, vaccines and the disruption to work, travel and socializing are topics most of us care to avoid. We’ve had enough.

So it is understandable that reports put together by the Children First advocacy organization analyzing the effects of the pandemic on children in suburban Philadelphia counties are not high on anyone’s reading list.

But the Children First reports have a very specific goal: to assess the effects pandemic disruptions had on children and to learn things that can be applied to the future.

Here are some takeaways from the Children First findings as reported in the recent series by staff writer Evan Brandt, “Our Kids and COVID.”

• “There is ample research indicating that more lives could have been saved if the nation’s public health infrastructure had been more prepared to respond to the sweeping COVID contagion,” according to the report. County and local medical professionals should concentrate on providing a “capable public health infrastructure,” for the future, the report authors recommended.

• Although children typically escaped the virus’s direct physical impact, “the pandemic itself caused a mental health crisis for children that continues unabated,” the report said. According to the national Centers for Disease Control, “mental healthrelated emergency department visits spiked 31 percent for adolescents ages 12 to 17 from March 2019 to March 2021,” according to the report.

Affordability and accessibility were both barriers to Montgomery County children getting the mental health help they needed, the report stated. Mental health services need to be expanded for children and adolescents, and “moderate- and low-income parents need the assurance that their children can rely on Medicaid, thus state and federal funds must continue to be available to ensure the continuity of their health care coverage,” the report’s authors wrote.

• One unexpected and welcome impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was how many children were, at least temporarily, lifted out of poverty, according to the report. “While parents were unable to work and schools were shuttered, federal flexibility and funds coupled with the Herculean efforts on the part of municipal, county, and school leaders provided extraordinary protections for children,” the report’s authors wrote. But the expiration of the tax credit at the end of last year threatens to plunge children back into poverty. “To sustain the reduced levels of child poverty achieved during the pandemic, citizens of Montgomery County must push their federal lawmakers to reenact the expanded Child Tax Credit,” the report stated.

• An educational assessment of 1.6 million students across the country found that, on average, students had fallen five months behind in math and four months behind in reading by the end of the 2020-21 school year. According to estimates based on a Pew Research study, about one in four students in the Norristown Area School District do not have high-speed internet access, compared to only one in 26 students in the much more affluent Lower Merion School District, the report found. Ultimately, “there is no temporary solution to the learning loss for students in Montgomery County. Onetime grants for tutoring to help students catch up are a shortterm fix and will leave far too many future graduates unprepared for a real-world job or college,” the report’s authors wrote. “State funds to close the educational resource gap are urgently needed to solve the county’s root educational disparity.”

• Lack of child care availability and high cost created a crisis for families, the report researchers found. “The average cost of full-time child care across the state is at least $12,530 a year for infants or toddlers; $10,640 for pre-school-aged children, and $9,800 for afterschool and summer care, and these costs are expected to continue to rise in 2022,” the authors wrote. The report found that although child care workers are charged with our most precious resource, they make less per hour than people working in retail.

Taken together, the analysis can seem insurmountable and inspire avoidance. But the messages are clear: There is much to be considered for better or worse from the ordeals that COVID wrought. We owe it to our children to look closely at the lessons learned and take action. After all, children are the future and the more we can improve their chances, the better off we will be as communities, as a nation, as society.