Teenage girls ‘worst affected mentally’ by Covid lockdowns, study claims
As the true scale of the mental health impact of the Covid lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 begins to emerge, new research suggests that teenage girls were the worst affected.
A new study, published in the journal of Child Development, is believed to be the first to assess whether personal memories predicted the declines in the psychological wellbeing of eight- to 16-year-olds during the pandemic.
Researchers from Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, the University of California, Riverside, and the University of California, Davis, asked the participants, who lived in Denmark during the pandemic, to reflect on personal memories from the first lockdown.
They were then asked to assess their psychological wellbeing and symptoms of poor mental health, such as depression. The team said that their findings underscore how aspects of personal memories might help increase or reduce the negative effects of the lockdowns.
Denmark joined numerous countries in locking down to slow the spread of Covid-19 between 2020 and 2021. The first lockdown took place in March 2020, and a second lockdown was put in force from 17 December 2020 until 6 May 2021.
During these periods, schools and workplaces were closed, as well as restaurants, cinemas and other public venues. Residents were asked to stay and work from home, practise social distancing from one another, and wear face masks if they had to be outside the home.
Dr. Tiril Fiellhaugen Hjuler, of Aarhus University Hospital, said: "As lockdown policies began to be implemented across the world, scholars and lay people alike started asking how they would impact children and teens.
"Different positions were debated ranging from sobering concerns for their mental health to expectations of increased resilience, which were all based on little direct knowledge of how the effects of an event of the magnitude of this pandemic would manifest.”
She continued: "We found that children’s and adolescents’ mental health decreased over time, and that adolescent females fared the worst at all time points.
"Second, we found that the content of memories lost detail over time, in terms of episodic specificity, semantic content, and emotional valence.
"Critically, we found that children and adolescents whose narratives contained more negative emotional content and included more factual information about Covid-19 and the resulting restrictions, fared the worst over time."
The study’s findings also suggested that the way children and adolescents remember and reflect on difficult times might have an impact on their mental health over time, Dr Hjuler added.
"We have known from previous research that there are associations between the emotional content of personal memories and indicators of psychological adjustment.
"Here, we are demonstrating a longitudinal association linking directly negative emotionality in narratives concerning events of global significance to measures of future well-being.
"One interesting finding is that integrating higher levels of factual information about difficult times also seems to have a negative impact on children’s and adolescents’ mental health.
"Imbuing factual information in a personal narrative may be a sign that children and teenagers attempted to distance themselves from the personally unique meaning of the lockdown experience.
"Thus, adults ought to be aware of how information about potential difficult times is discussed and communicated: observing certain content during child reminiscing may provide insight on risks for well-being."
Study co-author Dr. Simona Ghetti, of the University of California, Davis, said the researchers were surprised to find "a decrease in the memories’ negative emotional content over time", as they had expected the negativity to increase.
She said this reflected "the burden of facing the continued consequences of the pandemic over time".
"It is possible that this is because our analysis focused on memories for the first lockdown and by the time we assessed them later, other memories for the pandemic became more dominant or emotionally relevant," she hypothesised.
"Moreover, as children and adolescents during lockdowns were restricted from in-person socialisation and were unable to leave their residence over extended periods of time, their experiences became less unique and more schematised.
"Despite this normative change, the participants whose narratives were rated as conveying greater negative emotionality did worse over time, underscoring the importance of that early emotional content for participants’ well-being."
Dr. Hjuler added: "Future research should examine how memory narratives concerning challenging times, such as the lockdowns, might be different from other types of children’s narratives, including children’s and adolescents' personal memories about other relevant events and thoughts about the future.
"Only by examining the content of all these different memories will we know if these results reported here are specific to the first period of the pandemic, when radical changes in children’s and adolescents’ lives occurred, or if instead our patterns of results extend to other forms of remembering and imagining pandemic-related experiences."
Reporting by SWNS
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