The survey contained six questions about loneliness at school such as “I feel like an outsider (or left out of things) at school” and “I feel lonely at school”. In a sample of 1mn teenagers, school loneliness increased between 2012 and 2018 in 36 out of 37 countries. Nearly twice as many teenagers felt high levels of loneliness in 2018 than in 2012. The researchers found that school loneliness was higher when more students had access to smartphones and used the internet more hours per weekday. If the internet makes young people feel lonely, it’s no wonder the pandemic made them lonelier still.
Loneliness is bad for your health: researchers have found connections between chronic loneliness and heart disease, dementia, depression and anxiety. It can also change your perception of the world around you. One UK study asked young people about the friendliness of their neighbourhoods: it found that lonely youngsters ranked their neighbourhoods as worse than their non-lonely siblings.
If anyone is in a social recession, it is the young. As well as helping them to catch up with missed school work, we should think urgently about how to help them feel more connected to each other — crucially, in ways that don’t involve their phones.