Children Of Quarantine

What does a year of isolation and anxiety do to a developing brain?

- By Lisa Miller

STARTING ON APRIL 6, a bearded and earnest neuroscientist at the University of Oregon named Philip Fisher began to send a digital questionnaire—at first weekly, and then, beginning in August, biweekly— to a representative group of a thousand American families with young children. He’s curious about how they and their kids are doing. They aren’t doing so well. ¶ At first, writing into blank spaces on the questionnaire as if they were diaries, parents conveyed a fresh sense of surprise at their new reality. They observed their kids’ sudden regressions and general nervousness as novelties. Toilet-trained children were wetting their beds, and kids who once went to sleep easily became hard to soothe, waking at night or crawling in with their parents. “My son is suddenly scared of everything,” one Ohio parent wrote in the first week of June. An Arizona parent corroborated: “Our 2-year-old has had a very sudden increase in separation anxiety. She doesn’t like it when we leave the room, and at night she takes a long time to fall asleep because she doesn’t want us to go.”