Of course, schools are day care

The end of summer marks the beginning of freedom. We shouldn't say this, but school isn't just about educating kids; it's also about taking care of them. Working parents know how awful it is to have to arrange for babysitters or rearrange their own schedules when school is unexpectedly closed. A 2016 study estimated that the cost of child care during school closures during the normal workday would be $6,600 per year.

A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) suggests that school closures may even tempt parents to drink. The researchers found that in places with longer-than-average school closures during the coronavirus pandemic, maternal antidepressant use skyrocketed. As schools gradually reopened, new antidepressant prescriptions returned to pre-pandemic levels. The researchers also looked at alcohol purchases at grocery stores and found that more alcohol was purchased in counties with longer-than-average pandemic-related school closures, suggesting that people—the authors could not break down the trend by gender—were self-medicating due to the stress of school closures.

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The authors of the paper, titled “School Closures and Parental Mental Health,” conclude that “the school system plays an important role in maintaining the mental health of the population and helping families cope with stress.” Simply put, schools are not just for education, one of the authors, economist Sumedha Gupta of Indiana University, told me. “Ultimately, schools play an important role for families,” she said. “The educational aspect is one of the [part]but … schools offer counselors and therapies for children with learning disabilities. So it's a daycare and all these other things.”

By now, regret over the long school closures during the coronavirus pandemic has reached academic and policy circles. Study after study has highlighted the learning loss and behavioral difficulties students experienced during distance learning. But closing schools wasn't just bad because of the learning loss, because schools aren't just for kids. The problem isn't just what school closures did to kids, but what they did to kids. Parents.

During the pandemic, some teachers chafed at the assumption that educating the next generation of citizens was not their only job. Social media was awash with views like those expressed in a July 2020 blog post titled “School Is Not Childcare.” Its author, an educator, noted complaints that closed schools could not respond to children's hunger or protect them from dangers at home. “But what does that really have to do with education? Is that really the job of the school system?” the author asks. No, she concludes, “that is the job of the community, the government and the people.”

The working paper by Gupta and her colleagues Dario Salcedo and Kosali Simon of Indiana University tells a disturbing story about what happens when that care goes away: Mothers suffer. Previous research shows that the time women spend on child care skyrocketed during the pandemic. “What really hit me was this mothers-versus-fathers effect,” Gupta said, adding, “Women still bear the brunt of these things.”

Notably, the study found that “school closures have no statistically significant effects on fathers' need for antidepressants; any effects extend to mothers as well.” Increased demand for antidepressants was concentrated among black and Asian mothers, and increased alcohol use was concentrated in counties with higher black and Asian populations.

An important question is: How do we know that these effects are due to school closures and not the countless other stressors of a global pandemic? After all, people were hospitalized, more than a million Americans died, children were scared, parents lost their jobs. How could researchers know why mothers started demanding SSRIs?

Read: The biggest upheaval in the history of American education

The answer is: you can not fully sure. Economist Nicholas Papageorge of Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved in the new study but praised it, told me that school closures may be linked to other health-related closures, including those of bars, parks and other places where people go to escape the stresses of home. In this case, mothers may be driven to drink at least in part because there are other changes in their community that are linked to school closures.

However, as Papageorge noted, the recent findings are consistent with other research on the knock-on effects of school closures. A 2021 study found increases in parental stress, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and parental substance abuse during the pandemic. A 2022 systematic review of the evidence found that parental mental health worsened during school closures.

But perhaps the most compelling evidence in the NBER paper's conclusions are the distributional changes the researchers found. The new paper shows that women with elementary school-aged children suffered the most, consistent with the expectation that young children require the most time and attention. In addition, the researchers found, NO The difference is that fathers have higher standards of living, which is consistent with research on who is likely to bear the most childcare burden.

One clear finding from the new research is that extending school hours would be helpful for mothers and the wider community. Fortunately, year-round schooling is Also good for kids. The mayor of Philadelphia is piloting full-day classes in 25 schools starting this year, citing a long-studied phenomenon called the “summer slide” — which refers to the “losses in learning ability, health and well-being, college and career opportunities, and support needed to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty” that occur during the summer, as one newspaper put it. Schools elsewhere should consider similar measures.

I can certainly understand the argument that we expect too much from schools and teachers without supporting them sufficiently. But the problem is not seeing schools as fulfilling these broader functions; the problem is not giving them the resources to do so properly. And that is perhaps the bitterest pill to swallow: even without sufficient resources, schools can Despite it play the role of keeping an eye on children, allowing mothers to work, reducing crime, reducing hunger, and watching for signs of abuse. Whether they're closed on Presidents' Day, a teachers' strike, or a pandemic, the price isn't just a few points on a standardized test. It may well be the stability of an entire community.