Throughout the past year and a half, parents have been worried about if and how the pandemic will affect their kids long-term.  Is all the extra screen time going to have adverse effects" Will isolation prevent them from being able to properly socialize in the future" What is all this doing to their mental health" The questions and worries are endless, and have also been on the minds of researchers.
Catherine Birken, a paediatrician at Toronto’s SickKids hospital, leads a practice-based research network called TARGet Kids (The Applied Research Group for Kids) which focuses on the health of young kids. At the end of April 2020, TARGet Kids teamed up with three other ongoing studies in Ontario to look at how the pandemic has impacted children?s mental health. This week, they released the preliminary findings from data collected during February and March of 2021. The team surveyed children with and without pre-existing mental health diagnoses and found that more than half of the 758 kids aged 8 to 12 had clinically significant depressive symptoms. This number was even higher in teenagers?70 percent of those between the ages of 13 to 18 showed symptoms of clinically significant depression. Surveys were done periodically over the course of the second wave, but the preliminary data that has been released only includes what was gathered in February and March. These surveys focused on feelings of sadness and worry, low mood, inability to sleep and physical sy...