Dr. Phil McGraw rattled "The View" co-hosts on Monday after he criticized pandemic school closures and their lasting effect on school children, receiving push-back from the liberal hosts of the ABC show.
Sara Haines asked him about his new book, "We've Got Issues," and how one of the issues was social media.
"In, like, ’08, ’09, smartphones came on, and kids started, they stopped living their lives and starting watching people live their lives, and so we saw the biggest spike and the highest levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicidality, since records have ever been kept, and it’s just continued on and on and on. And then COVID hits 10 years later, and the same agencies that knew that, are the agencies that shut down the schools for two years. Who does that? Who takes away the support system for these children? Who takes it away and shuts it down?" McGraw said.
"And by the way, when they shut it down, they stopped the mandated reporters from being able to see children that were being abused and sexually molested and, in fact, sent them home and abandoned them to their abusers with no way to watch and referrals dropped 50% to 60%," he continued.
PANDEMIC LEARNING LOSS COULD COST STUDENTS THOUSANDS IN INCOME OVER THEIR LIFETIME: STUDY
Co-hosts Sunny Hostin and Whoopi Goldberg pushed back on McGraw and both said the school shutdowns during the pandemic were about "trying to save" the lives of children.
Goldberg said she and her fellow hosts knew a lot of people who died from COVID and Dr. Phil responded, "not school children."
"Maybe we’re lucky they didn’t, because they kept them out of the places that they could be sick, because no one wanted to believe that we had an issue," Goldberg continued. Co-host Ana Navarro asked him if he was saying no school children died from COVID.
"I'm saying it was the safest group, they were the less vulnerable group, and they suffered and will suffer more from the mismanagement of COVID than they will from the exposure to COVID, and that’s not an opinion. That’s a fact," McGraw responded during his media appearance.
Goldberg lamented that the co-hosts and their guest didn't even have time to "talk it out," before going to commercial.
Several studies conducted post-pandemic found that shuttering schools and forcing kids into remote-learning was harmful to their education and mental health. The Department of Education published a report in 2022 that found students' reading and math test scores plummeted.
"Average scores for age 9 students in 2022 declined 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics compared to 2020," the DOE found. "This is the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics," the DOE report read.
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Dr. Phil argued the effect of school closures and lockdowns would have a lasting impact during an episode of his show in 2022.
"Seventy million children will be forever affected by what they’ve gone through with the pandemic — how things were handled when our country was locked down, the pandemic that they’ve endured — all of us will be," he said.
Fox News' Alexander Hall contributed to this report.
