Member-only story
The Pandemic is Destroying My Teenager’s Mental Health
This is going to leave a mark.
We often talk about the pandemic in terms of generations. The Boomers are most vulnerable to succumbing to the virus. Generation X carries high financial burdens as they are most likely to have mortgages and kids still at home. We blame the spike in COVID-19 cases on Millennials, yet they make up the largest part of a workforce suffering an 11% unemployment rate.
But no one is talking about Gen Z.
My daughter is Gen Z. She’s 16 years old and a junior in high school. And she’s crashing. Hard.
Not since the Great Depression has our country been so rocked to the core of it’s being. Of course, back then, the impact on kids was minimal. The world isn’t like it is now. The adults carried the burden of a massive financial crisis but, for kids, life seemed normal. They could still do basic things like see friends and go to school. This doesn’t exist for my daughter right now.
I never had to endure anything that created a major external influence on my childhood. Sure, I remember growing up with an absurd amount of fear of Russia. I had no idea why I was afraid of Russia, it was just something that loomed out there but never really affected us. That’s about all the strife I remember in my life as a kid.
