Unraveling the Impact: How Has the Pandemic Affected Teen Attention Span?

I started working as a middle school social worker during the pandemic. Schools had been closed since March and it was now September. This means that for the past 6 months, kids were told that they could not play or learn together in-person. 

Finally, at the beginning of September (and when I started my new job) Colorado public schools were beginning to open-up doors to different “cohorts” of children every-other day. The idea behind this method was that if one child got covid-19, and infected their classmates, at least half the school was not “exposed”. Whether you agreed with the policies or not, the entire experience was dystopian. Groups of kids lined-up outside of school on their assigned-days wearing homemade cloth face masks waiting to get their temperature taken and put a pump of hand sanitizer on their palms before they entered school. Next, the kids sat at tables or desks 6 feet away from each other and were asked to login to their chrome books. All students, both at-home and in-school ,would then follow a lesson-plan on their computers and engage with each other through a chat box.

Teaching under these circumstances was disjointed. The teacher would often have to toggle between students at-home and in the classroom, which included answering questions on the computer while keeping an eye on the students with hands raised in the classroom. Most students learning in their remote settings, were left to login to their classrooms alone in their bedrooms or even alone in their houses. Parents had to go back to work, stress was high and entire industries were being cut. The last thing parents were able to do was monitor their kids’ education. 

Eventually, a progression started that resulted in a complete dissolution of our children’s attention span. The erosion of this executive functioning skill (where you sit still and focus on subjects not of their choosing) that was built upon since kindergarten was now destroyed in a six-month timeframe.

 It would often start innocently, a teacher would allow for a 10-minute break for the entire class (even kids working remotely), or the teacher would forget about the students online almost entirely for several minutes while managing classroom rules (of which there was now endless). When this happened, students participating in remote learning would open another tab or grab their phones, tablets and start to play a video game while they waited. Transitioning away from a science lesson on cell anatomy and into the world of Fortnite quickly became the norm. However, these games provided a relief from the gloomy existence that these kids were operating in. It became hard to transition back into the digital classroom. In addition, grades and academic feedback were basically non-existent. Everyone was just “getting by” with the district already starting to plan for how our institutions were going to somehow handle these inevitable learning deficits in the years to come. It was a problem for later, not now when we were still wiping down our groceries. 

When the awkward school year of “hybrid” learning ended, and the new academic school year started, it was clear that the damage had been done in terms of how our students were able to function in the classroom. Kids were now physically in their schools 5 days a week, but they were still on their Chromebooks toggling between tabs when they felt like teachers were not watching. The video game and social media usage became impossible to turn off both at-home and now in the classroom. Students became anxious and irritable when they were told they couldn’t be online. Staying on-task for more than a few minutes without the dopamine hit of checking a “like” on instagram or saving a life on Fortnite became excruciating. The withdrawal started to manifest into anger and defiant behavior in the classroom. 

It has been more than 4 years since the pandemic began, so what do we do now? 

It might seem harsh, but phones do not belong in schools. Keep them at-home, make your kid memorize your cell number so that they can call from the school’s line if needed (also- your school can always look it up too). 

Most schools have firewalls setup to block sites like instagram etc., but kids find plugins and other work-arounds. As a result, band together (like Jonathan Haidt suggests) and ask your school to limit screens- even if it's for academic purposes. Get out paper and pens. Demonstrate more on the white board and force socialization with in-person group work. I promise your teen will still learn how to type and they already know how to find what they need (research) online. 

For the big question of what to do with video games…..

Ideally, don’t buy them. Don’t make it part of your family’s culture. Don’t even own a console. 

More realistically…. Be prepared to shut it down and take it away when needed. Be ruthless. Make sure you limit the time and monitor the communication that takes place within them– especially on programs like Twitch. 

Overall, getting our kids back to experiences in-person will help with their sleep, irritability, ability to perform undesirable (but necessary) tasks and their socialization skills. We learned so much during the pandemic of what not to do, now is the time to course-correct.