Children Once They Start School

Some conditions are measured in hours. A boy with sudden, severe pain on one side of the scrotum has testicular torsion: the blood vessel the testicle hangs from has twisted, and the blood supply is cut off. Treated within 6 hours, the testicle is saved in 97.2% of cases. Delayed to 19 to 24 hours, only 42.5%. This pain cannot wait until school lets out, and it cannot wait until the exam is over.

Scoliosis is the spine curving to the side. A brace is a hard-shell vest worn on the body to hold the spine up. Worn while the bones are still growing, 75% of children did not curve far enough to need surgery; among those only observed without a brace, just 42%. The time when a brace can be worn follows when the bones finish growing, not the high school or college entrance exams; wait until the exams are over and often only surgery is left.

Children bullied by peers are about 2.2 times as likely as children who are not bullied to develop suicidal thoughts, and about 2.6 times as likely to have engaged in suicidal behavior. When the school receives a report it must investigate immediately; if it is determined to be bullying there must be discipline, and serious cases must not be covered up and must be reported to the public security authorities. So report it the same day, ask for the determination procedure to be followed, and leave a written record.

When first graders in primary school got an extra 40 minutes of outdoor class each day, the share of children newly becoming nearsighted over three years fell from about four in ten to about three in ten. The amount the health commission gives is at least 2 hours outdoors in the daytime every day, or 14 hours a week in total. Cloudy days count, and standing outside during class breaks counts too.

The National Health Commission requires no screens for ages 0 to 3, as little contact as possible for ages 3 to 6, and for primary and secondary school students, non-study use of no more than 15 minutes at a time and no more than 1 hour a day. The reason given is that prolonged close-up eye use makes myopia come earlier. The evidence linking screens and myopia is not that solid; what has actually been shown to work in trials is 2 hours outdoors every day.

Myopia does not get better on its own, and the prescription cannot come back down. Nor is it just a matter of “wearing glasses.” Compared with people who are not nearsighted, the likelihood of myopic maculopathy is a dozen-odd times higher with mild myopia and several hundred times higher at 600 degrees or more. For retinal detachment, it is about 3 times higher with mild myopia and about 13 times higher at 600 degrees or more. So the earlier a child becomes nearsighted and the faster it progresses, the greater the risk they will carry later on.

Primary and secondary schools organize a student health checkup once a year. The focus items on the report are overweight, obesity, malnutrition, abnormal spinal curvature, poor vision and tooth decay, and these are the ones most easily left to slide. Don't just glance at height and weight and put the report away. If any of these items is abnormal, take your child to a specialist that same year and get it checked out.

US preventive guidelines recommend screening children aged 12 to 18 for major depression; for ages 11 and under, the evidence is insufficient. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among children aged 10 to 19. The school's yearly psychological assessment is only a general survey and cannot serve as a diagnosis. If your child says they feel awful, or their eating, sleep, interests or grades suddenly change, go straight to a psychiatry or clinical psychology department.

The State Administration for Market Regulation says plainly that “under current medical technology, myopia cannot be cured.” Claims such as “restore,” “lower the prescription,” “myopia cured” and “prescription repair” are to be investigated and punished strictly. When you see words like these, rule the product out right away; there is no need to compare prices. Eye-care devices count as medical devices, and e-commerce platforms are responsible for checking whether sellers are qualified to sell them.

The documents state 10 hours of sleep a day for primary school students, 9 hours for junior high and 8 hours for senior high. Morning classes in primary school generally start no earlier than 8:20, and in secondary school no earlier than 8:00. In 2025 it was further set that there be at least 2 hours of physical activity a day and no ranking by exam scores. If your child is short of sleep for a long time, first check against these provisions; don't start by blaming the child for dawdling.

Leave of absence is a formal system. The parents or another guardian apply, and the school confirms it and reports it to the level above for approval. Each leave lasts at most 1 year; if more leave is needed when it ends, apply again. During the leave, the school must keep the child's enrollment status, and when they return they carry on from there. The specific procedures are set by each province; ask the school's academic affairs office or the local education bureau.

Cycloplegic refraction means first putting in eye drops that relax the muscle in the eye responsible for focusing, then measuring the prescription. It is done at a hospital and is the most accurate way to diagnose myopia. The health commission states that these drops do no harm to healthy eyes, and the eyes return to normal once the drops are stopped. Don't take a single computerized refraction at a glasses shop as a diagnosis, and don't refuse to get your child glasses because you are “afraid the prescription will go up.”

Pit and fissure sealing means sealing the grooves on the chewing surface of the back teeth with resin, so that food debris can't get stuck in them. Two years after sealing, the odds of decay are about one-eighth of those for unsealed teeth. Without sealing, 16% of tooth surfaces decay; with sealing, only about 5%. It still works four years later.

Those who truly meet the bar for “gaming disorder” are about two or three in every hundred. When a questionnaire's cutoff is set low and only adolescents are surveyed, the proportion comes out inflated. Looking at game companies' real records, how much people play has almost nothing to do with how good or bad they feel. Under the rules, minors may play only from 8 to 9 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays.

Among secondary school students in China, children who like the same sex or like both sexes are about 3 to 5.5 times as likely as others to have attempted suicide in a year. Studies abroad found that children strongly rejected by their families in adolescence went on to attempt suicide far more often. Those whose parents sent them for “conversion” attempted suicide the most.

Children who are often hit have more aggression and more psychological problems, are more distant from their parents, and more often get hit even harder. Whether hitting makes a child obey on the spot, the evidence can't say. Children who are often yelled at or called stupid at age 13 later get into more trouble and have more depression, and parents' everyday warmth doesn't offset this.

In trials that assigned families by lot, classes that teach parents concrete ways of handling their children reduced children's problems with hitting and breaking rules, and parents' moods improved too. Parents also hit and yelled at their children less: most clearly right after the course, still present a year or two later, but much smaller. Shanghai has also tried this kind of course, and it worked.

The law expressly prohibits treating internet addiction by means that harm a child's body and mind. A special-training school in Hefei handcuffed a boy who had just been sent there in a confinement room, and about 44 hours later he was dead. Yuzhang Academy in Nanchang locked students in solitary confinement; several of the people in charge were sentenced, and when parents asked for their tuition back, the court did not support it.