Lockdowns Are Breaking Our Kids
I am republishing an opinion story from The New York Post, by Bethany Mandel – 2/8/2021
Then I am going to add my own piece to this Bob’s Opinion post.
OPINION from The New York Post …
Lockdowns are breaking our kids — and the damage may be permanent.
February 8, 2021 | 7:00pm | Updated
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On Twitter recently, writer Ann Bauer recounted a meeting she attended with a Minnesota lawmaker about school closures in her area. Parents testified that they’re worried about suicides; a 15-year-old growing up in the wealthy suburb sobbed about how she has gone to a place “so dark, she didn’t know if she’d get out.”
Continued lockdowns are killing our kids — literally.
A Las Vegas school district saw such a spike in suicide numbers, it rushed forward its reopening plan. The superintendent explained to The New York Times, “When we started to see the uptick in children taking their lives, we knew it wasn’t just the COVID numbers we need to look at anymore. We have to find a way to put our hands on our kids, to see them, to look at them. They’ve got to start seeing some movement, some hope.”
Chris Buckner, the father of a young man in Illinois who committed suicide, told the media that “the teen had been battling depression the last few years, but his depression worsened significantly after COVID hit.’”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children’s mental-health-related visits to emergency rooms are up by as much as a third, compared to 2019 figures.
In a single week in mid-March 2020, kids’ lives were turned upside-down. They lost it all in short order: routine, school, friends, activities. There is no indication if or when things may return to normal, and they are now spending their days glued to Zoom school, isolated and increasingly besieged by the effects of our pandemic-mitigation efforts.
I spoke with a number of mental-health experts about what this moment could be doing to kids’ and teens’ mental health in the long term. Is the baby in a viral Internet video who thought every box is hand sanitizer, for example, at increased likelihood for obsessive-compulsive disorder, caused by our hyper-focus on hygiene the past 10 months? Are older kids and teens doomed to a lifetime of crippling anxiety and depression?
J.D. Friedman, a clinical psychologist and partner at Baker Street Behavioral Health in Northern New Jersey, was reassuring, to a point. He told me, “You cannot give a child, or anyone else, OCD.” That’s good news, but unfortunately, there’s a catch.
For kids who were already predisposed to mental illnesses like depression, anxiety or OCD (to name a few), Friedman explained this moment “can absolutely tip the scales to full-blown pathology.” Whereas many kids may have had a hope of coming through childhood into adulthood without issue under normal circumstances, though would have been at increased risk for problems due to family instability or genetics, due to lockdowns the majority of these kids will likely see their mental-health issues intensify and speed up.
For the average child, the prognosis for long-term mental-health recovery is optimistic. For now. Kids are resilient, but, again, only up to a point. If lockdowns continues into the fall and 2022 — as many parents fear will happen, with teachers unions obstructing a return to in-person learning — mental-health experts fear that we’re facing a generation of scarred and broken men and women.
Millions of American kids are struggling, and their chances for long-term improved mental health is predicated on the notion that we will now prioritize their emotional well-being, which our society has tragically shown it has no intention of doing.
Our hope for raising an emotionally healthy and mentally stable generation is dissipating with every day kids are kept locked in their bedrooms and out of schools. Skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety are in no small part due to the fact that children feel neglected and forgotten, and they are not wrong to feel that way.
Our society has abandoned them and treated them as disposable. The damage caused by this abandonment is incalculable, and compounding every day we allow inertia, irrationality and the craven priorities of teachers unions to rule our decision-making.
Amber Alert … Open Our Schools
By: R.S. Helms – Bob’s Opinion – 2/9/2021
Lockdown AMBER ALERT!
Reading through my emails this morning and one really caught my eye, from the New York Post’s Op Ed. (Hopefully, you read it to get here). It concerned our children and the COVID-19 Panic that has been controlling the people of the world and more so the people of our nation. The article brought to mind something that we do not hear about as often as we once did.
The condition is known as ‘Cabin Fever’ and it was a condition found more often during the 19th century and the western frontier, explorers and fur trappers of the Rockies would find themselves holed up in a one room little cabin for weeks or even a month or so, snowed in and the mental effects it had on them. However, cabin fever could happen if one is simply isolated or confined as in ‘shelter in place’ thinking of our politicians and agency officials who are making panic policies to control the people.
I am writing a lengthy article (short story), dealing with the mess America finds itself in. But, back to the children who are truly suffering from a form of cabin fever over the COVID-19 ‘lockdown’ that is the lock-out of schools and other activities. Humans have a built-in herd mentality which we call socializing we have to interact with others, and one of the things God tells us not to neglect or forsake (Heb. 10:25). We teach our children to socialize and to be with other children, in school, with friends, in activities, and over the cell phone is not the same as getting together and do whatever kids do, we do not want them to get in trouble, that is why we teach them to choose the right friends. But children have a great need to get together and school is where they are put together for 9 or so months a year, put together in activities, free time and through their school chums they get together over the weekends, evenings, and outside activities.
However, when you force quarantine a child, we are in effect isolating that child, that family. Taking away their freedom, and their constitutional rights of our free sovereign Republic of the United States. For the children who do not have a personal relationship with Jesus, or their families are without the hope of Jesus in their lives, it can be especially hard, especially a situation without hope. But of us who do have the hope that is within us we know that the God of all creation is still in control and He know all about and knows the outcome. Still, even so, given the circumstance of isolation with extremely limited outside contact, except to go to the store, or doctor, we were virtually locked out of everything, jobs, business,’ schools, and yes church. This is the open invitation for cabin fever to come calling and even for a grizzled mountain man it would hard not to start sinking into a dark world of hopelessness.
That is when some of these things start happening.
Signs of cabin fever
Cabin fever is a state of mind that can encompass feelings of:
- restlessness
- impatience
- anxiety
- lack of motivation
- loneliness
- hopelessness
- depression
Now, consider our children, and think about how they are, it is in their nature to get bored with an attitude, restless and impatience, anxious, and unmotivated about doing things, (especially if it is schoolwork or chores, and loneliness, we all know that feeling we all have had times of feeling lonely even in a crowd and how lonely and depressed a child gets when they have a falling out with one of their close friends, and if it is a boyfriend or girlfriend, (post adolescent) it is really bad and the cause for many teenage suicide.
One young person lost to suicide is one too many, I learned firsthand while counselling with families and parents who have lost children, and the most heart breaking is the ones of suicide. I counseled with a woman who had lost her teenage son to suicide, I remember the first session as we discussed why she felt she needed counseling? Why a Christian counselor? She had tried secular counseling and found no hope not even in group therapy and group support, she was not a Christian and neither was her boy. She reached in her purse and retrieved a sandwich bag which contained a hand written note, she took it from the bag and handed it to me, it was her son’s blood-spattered suicide note, I read it and it was from a young man who had no hope in his heart or soul, he had never come to know the hope in Jesus Christ, instead he had his hope in man, his choices of friends and in his religion, and when put to the test he received only ridicule and the usual ‘pick yourself up’ and all the wrong advise nothing that would bring him the help of Jesus for His healing.
I met with the lady several times and heard and felt her grief and unable to give her the emotional relief she so desperately, she desperately needed Jesus and not the Jesus of her false religion and trying to lead a horse to water is one thing, but you cannot make the horse drink, you can lead a lost soul to the door of their salvation, but you cannot open it for them. However, the seeds were planted when she left counseling but nearly a year later, she was still searching for hope in her darkness of despair when her church leader sent her back to me and mid-way through the six-month term she accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior, she then found her hope that was in Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit she learned to cope and found her peace in Jesus.
Why did the boy lose his hope? Could it be, that because he had never known where true hope lay, he placed his hope in the world and a false religion, he placed his hope in his friends who were simply bad choices made in the need to belong. Children must be allowed to find their own social requirements some are very social, some are not.
However, with the lockdowns occurring because of the COVID-19 we can see the effects of the non-mental condition of Cabin Fever, and the downside of it as seen in over a third of our youngsters committing suicide. Over 33% increase nationwide. And do not expect the mainstream media to report on that gruesome statistic because it definitely does not fit the left’s agenda.
The only agenda that the left and RINOs care about is the UN Agenda 21/2030 which includes everything they have thrown at us for the past 12 years and it has had Alinsky Rules for Radicals input in the way Americans have been brainwashed and moved into liberal socialism, COVID is just another weapon in their toolbox of destruction, destruction of our nation the Constitution and our people. The socialist push has been going on for decades, however, it started getting out of hand with George HW and just become more and more aggressive.
But all in all, this Amber Alert should be for America, our Constitutional Freedoms, and our religious freedom, it is all going rapidly down the dark hole of socialism and ruin. The Liberal Socialists with their friends the RINO Globalist are to blame, However, ultimately, we conservatives are to blame. Yes, we are by voting party (Republican) because it is where we find all the globalists who have been trying to remake the Republican Party, we have been voting GOP and not researching the candidates during the Primaries and voting for conservative Constitutionalist Christians (regardless of color) … but we have not and we wind up with the McConnell, Romney, McCain, Ryan, and a new one surfaced during this latest go-round of sham impeachments. It is how the Shadow Government stays in place, and people like Pelosi and Chucky boy, Biden and all the other socialist who really do not give a flip about the Constitution or the people.
Well one thing should be known is, locking the doors of our public schools is putting our young people at risk, and even long-term damage, and the risk is not worth locking the schools. But the liberal majority of teachers who belong to the teacher’s unions, associations, or federation mobs of the organized political crime families will continue doing what the Soros type organizers say.
In closing, we need to have the Constitutional conservative legal citizens (Brown-Black-Yellow-White), unite, do our homework on any candidate, or attempt to mess with the voter laws, and what is happening behind the scenes while the publicized Issues in congress and see what is really going on. Then demand your state follow their own voter laws and investigate any irregularities and make sure the Federal government does not take control and take the voter laws away from the state.
Keep a calm and peace about ourselves but stand our ground. Do not fire the first shot, even though we have been jabbed and poked for the past couple of decades and allow God to work a good work in us. Be peaceful, but aggressive, do not riot or be led into a riot, yes fight back but fight wise and peacefully, don’t let them bully you into violence if there is violence let them be the ones who start it.
Be Safe and Healthy and Keep your Children Safe and Healthy!
R.S. Helms.
