Children in Crisis

Children in Crisis Paula Fass (bio), Kriste Lindenmeyer (bio), Steven Mintz (bio), and Bengt Sandin (bio) Today's children have been buffeted by a series of critical events. In the United States, the critical events for children's lives include the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, a global pandemic that left a million Americans dead, intensifying political polarization, and a long overdue reckoning with race, police violence, entrenched inequalities, and persistent poverty. We are beginning to see, among the immediate consequences, the worst learning losses in thirty years, a mental health crisis as reported rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness soared among adolescents, and extreme negativity about the future.1 No one knows what the long-term effects will be. Will these experiences be like those inflicted by the Great Depression, leaving indelible scars lasting a lifetime? Or will these events be more like the September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks: a shock that most Americans have seemingly gotten over? The Great Depression offers an example of a pivotal event that echoed across children's later lives. It colored a whole generation's lifelong attitudes toward money, family, work, education, politics, and financial security. Depression-era stresses left a lasting imprint on boys' and young men's later lives, inflicting a heavy cost on their health, and in many instances cutting short their lives in their forties and fifties. But the Depression also enhanced many young women's assertiveness, resourcefulness, and sense of self-efficacy.2 Thanks, in part, to the emergency economic assistance provided by the US government to individuals and families during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, most American families stayed financially afloat. In fact, the child poverty rate actually fell to the lowest levels ever recorded in the second half of 2020 through 2021, mostly credited to the temporary extension of increased child tax credits, higher unemployment insurance payments, and other federal COVID economic interventions.3 The pandemic's emotional toll is another story. The pandemic undercut children's and adults' sense of life's predictability and their already flagging End Page 189 confidence in the future. It also fostered anomie, alienation, and social isolation. In the pandemic's wake, many children developed what we have come to view as trauma-like symptoms. Even after the worst instances of mortality passed, teachers continue to report that many American schoolchildren remain intensely anxious, depressed, and persistently sad. Among the behavioral red flags that they see are signs of withdrawal, stress, a loss of focus, and pent-up rage. Some of these feelings can be traced directly to the pandemic, but others are cumulative, outgrowths of the Great Recession, compounded by more amorphous anxieties and apprehensions over the changing climate, job market, American and world politics, and general forebodings about the future. Over-parenting may also be contributing to the growing anxiety of children.4 Scholarship on the history of children and adolescents offers insights into better understanding the influence of growing up in turbulent times such as pandemics, economic crises, and wars. Early studies focused on victimhood—on the ways that children in the past were abused and exploited.5 That approach prompted a reaction as a growing number of scholars highlighted children's agency. They emphasized themes that included resilience, resistance, and the development of semiautonomous children and youth subcultures.6 A powerful strand in recent scholarship has questioned what it considers an overemphasis on young people's agency and has instead drawn upon the psychological concept of trauma to better understand the long-term impact of painful childhood experiences.7 In November 2022, a group of historians who have been working on the history of childhood and youth (Paula Fass, Kriste Lindenmeyer, Steven Mintz, and Bengt Sandin) organized a cross-disciplinary workshop seeking to understand how past examples of children and youth who have undergone difficult experiences as a result of disease, war, community disruptions, and other forms of extraordinary change might illuminate present-day matters. The workshop, entitled Children in Crisis: Trauma, Epidemics, and Children's Well-being in Cross-cultural and Historical Perspective, was generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Historical Association...