We've been told time and again that the past two years of lockdowns and shutdowns and school closures and "quarantines" wouldn't have much of an effect on kids. "Kids are resilient," we were told over and over again.

But now we have a good bird's-eye view of just how kids coped over the past two years, and it's not pretty:

Children's screen time has doubled during the pandemic — and it hasn't gone down since, according to new research. Researchers from the University of California-San Francisco say youngsters are spending almost eight hours a day looking at smartphones, tablets, and televisions, compared to less than four hours before COVID.

Concerningly, this figure does not include the time spent on computers for school work. Researchers focused completely on recreational activities like playing video games, chatting on social media, texting, surfing the internet, and watching or streaming movies and TV shows. Along with contributing to a more sedentary lifestyle, study authors say this shift is also affecting the mental health of many adolescents.

Just hold on a second here: "Sedentary lifestyle?" "Mental health?"

You're telling me that locking kids up away from their friends, for months and months and months, allowing them to stare into screens all day, precipitously driving up the amount of time they spend looking at little digital projections and living in a fantasy world...you mean to say they're now plugged in way, way more than they used to be, and all of it is making them less healthy?

This has got to be the most groundbreaking discovery in the history of science research. A Nobel prize is surely forthcoming! Alas, if only we had known about this two years ago—if only we could have seen it coming—we might have done things differently. Maybe.