This Is What They Took From You: 17 Year Olds Have Never Known A Normal Teenage Life Thanks To Lockdowns
Homework, high-school crushes, papers, football games, dances, musicals, horrible lunches, after-school clubs: these are the things that filled normal teenage life before the Covid era. Most are social experiences. Even studying for “the big test” was usually done with friends.
Thanks to bad policies and government-imposed isolation, many teens are suffering. They’ve spent so long being socially conditioned to hide their faces, isolate, and fear even the slightest possibility of death, that they lack the ability to function properly as a generation. Last June it was reported that youth suicide attempts had increased by over 50%, and by October a national state of emergency in childhood mental health was declared by the American Association of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association.