{"id":341990,"date":"2025-12-10T23:56:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T23:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/341990\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T23:56:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T23:56:12","slug":"school-reopenings-tied-to-better-mental-health-for-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/341990\/","title":{"rendered":"School Reopenings Tied to Better Mental Health for Kids"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"storyParagraph\">&#13;<br \/>\n                                        A new study suggests that the mental health of California children was boosted significantly after schools resumed in-person classes in 2021, adding weight to the debate over the costs of prolonged pandemic school closures, per the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/12\/08\/health\/school-closures-mental-health.html?campaign_id=9&amp;emc=edit_nn_20251209&amp;instance_id=167686&amp;nl=the-morning&amp;regi_id=58599836&amp;segment_id=212001&amp;user_id=b36448afe728acf1dadb936023013345\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">New York Times<\/a>. Researchers analyzed medical claims for nearly 186,000 privately insured children ages 5 to 18, finding that, nine months after schools reopened, the likelihood of a child receiving mental health care dropped by 43%.&#13;\n                                    <\/p>\n<p class=\"storyParagraph\">&#13;<br \/>\n                                        Spending on mental health medications for conditions like depression, anxiety, and ADHD also fell, by 7.5%, while spending on therapy and similar treatments declined by 10.6%. The improvements were especially pronounced among girls. The study&#8217;s authors argue that policymakers in California failed to fully weigh the social and psychological toll on children. Rita Hamad, a Harvard public health researcher and study co-author, said the research highlights risks that may have been underappreciated at the time.&#13;\n                                    <\/p>\n<p class=\"storyParagraph\">&#13;<br \/>\n                                        Hamad noted that her team&#8217;s data only covers children with private insurance, meaning the results could understate the problem. A follow-up study will look at Medicaid recipients. The study, published in the journal <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.lww.com\/epidem\/abstract\/9900\/effect_of_school_reopenings_on_children_s_mental.427.aspx\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Epidemiology<\/a>, attempts to isolate the effect of school closures by taking advantage of California&#8217;s staggered school-reopening timeline. However, some outside experts caution that other factors, such as the rollout of vaccines and a general easing of pandemic fears, could also have contributed to the improvements. &#8220;The findings offer lessons for future public health emergencies and provide insight into why mental health worsened for children during the pandemic,&#8221; Hamad says in a <a href=\"https:\/\/hsph.harvard.edu\/news\/school-reopening-during-covid-19-pandemic-associated-with-improvement-in-childrens-mental-health\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">release<\/a>.&#13;\n                                    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#13; A new study suggests that the mental health of California children was boosted significantly after schools resumed&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341991,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[2763,2356,151,4000,2754,21595,97,8284,259,260,171523,5497],"class_list":{"0":"post-341990","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-anxiety","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-children","11":"tag-covid-19","12":"tag-depression","13":"tag-discoveries","14":"tag-health","15":"tag-kids","16":"tag-mental-health","17":"tag-mentalhealth","18":"tag-school-closing","19":"tag-study"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}