Third-grade teacher Samantha Thompson was on recess duty when she heard screams. Alarmed, she scanned the playground for the source of the distress till she found the boy.

When she asked why he was screaming, the kid shrugged and replied, “I don’t know.”

In her first weeks back to school in San Diego, Thompson found this to be a common scene. “When I first came back, there was a lot of screaming for no reason,” she says. “The kids will be outside playing, and they’ll just start screaming really loud to get people’s attention or to get them to do what they want.”

After more than a year of lockdown, experts agree that pandemic isolation has impacted some kids’ social skills, especially their