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COVID Lockdowns, Quarantines Linked to Mental Distress in Teens
A study of 7,800 teens aged 16 to 18 years in Norway ties stringent COVID-19 public health protocols and quarantine with mental distress, particularly among 16-year-olds and those with less-educated parents and a lower genetic susceptibility to depression.
On March 12, 2020, the Norwegian government closed schools and issued stay-at-home mandates, ordered 14-day quarantines for those who had traveled abroad or had contact with infected people, and initiated travel restrictions to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
Strict COVID-19 public health measures, recent quarantine, and frequent quarantines were linked to greater mental distress, and the association wasn’t changed by sex, age, pre-pandemic anxiety or depression, or genetic liability for mental illness in general. The effects were especially apparent among 16-year-olds, those with parents with lower educational attainment, and those with lower genetic susceptibility to depression.
“Adolescents who experienced increased mental distress during the COVID-19 pandemic may be at risk of continued mental health problems and in need of ongoing support,” they added.
AI Is Overpowering Efforts to Catch Child Predators, Experts Warn
The volume of sexually explicit images of children being generated by predators using artificial intelligence is overwhelming law enforcement’s capabilities to identify and rescue real-life victims, child safety experts warn.
Prosecutors and child safety groups working to combat crimes against children say AI-generated images have become so lifelike that in some cases it is difficult to determine whether real children have been subjected to real harms for their production. A single AI model can generate tens of thousands of new images in a short amount of time, and this content has begun to flood both the dark web and seep into the mainstream internet.
There are already tens of millions of reports made each year of real-life child sexual abuse material (CSAM) created and shared online each year, which safety groups and law enforcement struggle to investigate.
“We’re just drowning in this stuff already,” said a Department of Justice prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “From a law enforcement perspective, crimes against children are one of the more resource-strapped areas, and there is going to be an explosion of content from AI.”
Deceptive ‘Copycat’ Cannabinoid Snacks Are Putting Children at Risk, U.S. Agency Warns
Companies are “putting the health of young children at risk” by illegally selling “copycat” food products that contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive component of cannabis, but packaged to look like well-known snack brands, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned.
The FDA and the Federal Trade Commission issued warning letters on 16 July to several companies over this practice, which violates the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, requiring products to be accurately and clearly labeled and packaged. They identified examples of items that mimicked popular brands of crisps, biscuits, and sweets but contained delta-8-THC.
The FDA’s principal deputy commissioner, Namandjé Bumpus, said, “As accidental ingestion and/or overconsumption of delta-8-THC containing products could pose considerable health risks, the companies who sell these illegal products are demonstrating complete neglect for consumer safety.”
Overcoming Our Denial About Smartphones’ Effect on Kids
It’s no mystery why state and national governments are enacting such bans. Both common sense and a plethora of studies demonstrate that smartphones are addictive, distracting, and corrosive to mental health. Instead of learning and making friends with their classmates, students are being emotionally and intellectually stunted as they mindlessly consume content from their smartphones most hours of the day. To make matters worse, this attachment was significantly strengthened by the COVID lockdowns four years ago.
I have personally witnessed this evolution (or devolution) in my own classes. While phone addiction was a problem before the pandemic, it was at least manageable. Now, however, the majority of students depend heavily on their smartphones merely to function, and they will mutiny against any teacher who tries to ban them from the classroom. More often than not, teachers are forced to compromise (i.e. allowing “brain breaks” where kids play on their phone for a few minutes during class) and pick their battles (i.e. going after the worst offenders).
Thus, it’s now common to see talented students from otherwise stable homes underperform in class, disengage from school events, suffer from acute anxiety, and retreat to cyberspace at every opportunity. Sure enough, this trend is reflected in abysmal standardized test results, which is likely why testing companies like The College Board continue to revise and recalibrate the SAT and AP exams. If these tests stayed the same, the decline would be easily visible and precipitate mass outrage.
There happen to be a few objections — none of them good — to taking away phones. Many of them stem from a fundamental distrust of educators, but underneath the excuses is an unwillingness to see the truth and admit our mistakes.
A New Development in the Debate About Instagram and Teens
The teens are on Instagram. That much is obvious. A majority of teens say they use the app, including 8% who say they use it “almost constantly,” according to the Pew Research Center. And yet a lot is still unknown about what such extensive use might do to kids. Many people believe that it and other social media apps are contributing to a teen mental health crisis.
Now, after years of contentious relationships with academic researchers, Meta is opening a small pilot program that would allow a handful of them to access Instagram data for up to about six months in order to study the app’s effect on the well-being of teens and young adults. The company will announce today that it is seeking proposals that focus on certain research areas — investigating whether social media use is associated with different effects in different regions of the world, for example — and that it plans to accept up to seven submissions.
Once approved, researchers will be able to access relevant data from study participants — how many accounts they follow, for example, or how much they use Instagram and when. Meta has said that certain types of data will be off-limits, such as user-demographic information and the content of media published by users; a full list of eligible data is forthcoming, and it is as yet unclear whether internal information related to ads that are served to users or Instagram’s content-sorting algorithm, for example, might be provided.
The program is being run in partnership with the Center for Open Science, or COS, a nonprofit. Researchers, not Meta, will be responsible for recruiting the teens and will be required to get parental consent and take privacy precautions. Meta shared details about the initiative exclusively with The Atlantic ahead of the announcement.
Multiple Moves During Childhood Can Increase the Risks of Depression in Later Life
People who experience a significant number of moves before the age of 15 are over 40% more likely to be diagnosed with depression in later life, a new study has shown.
The research, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, analyzed all residential locations of almost 1.1 million people born in Denmark between 1981 and 2001 and who stayed in the
Specifically, children who move once between ages 10 to 15 are 41% more likely to be diagnosed with depression than those who don’t move. And if a child moves twice or more between the ages of 10 and 15, the risk rises to around 61%. This is a stronger effect than growing up in a deprived neighborhood.
Children Living in Greener Neighborhoods Show Better Lung Function
A large study of 35,000 children from eight countries has found a “robust” link between exposure to green spaces in early childhood and better lung function. The study, led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), has been published in Environment International.
The research used data from 10 European birth cohorts from 8 countries (Denmark, France, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain and the U.K.) to conduct a meta-analysis. This assessment of the data was done at the individual level for each participant.
While the positive association of living in greener neighborhoods with lung function was observed regardless of socioeconomic status, the effect was stronger in children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.
