Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]
medrxiv.org
medrxiv.org
Everyone needs pre-registration, and everyone needs open data.
Its mostly because extraordinary claims receive more attention, and thus is found by the group for whom the result supported their prior beliefs. They will use it whenever they need to support such. This is also why such studies tend to keep getting cited as evidence long after a long line of failures to replicate have been published. As the result is non-replicable, there also wont be a newer, improved version of the publication, meaning all cites go to the original.
But the combination of publish-or-perish and grant seeking pushing sensationalism isn't good for honesty let alone accuracy or precision.
No, that does not follow at all.
But it seems very appropriate that you quote one statistic and then make a claim about a completely different one. Good exercise/example for the reader.
Perhaps my comment is slightly off-topic, but I just like to leave a friendly reminder since I don’t find epidemiological conclusions under enough scrutiny in public fora these days.
As they show data comparing 2020 and 2021 to the previous years, they could have shown a matrix to compare year over year across the data.
I will wait for someone to look at the raw data and peer review the paper before jumping to conclusions.
I'm not discounting that the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on child development, I would be surprised if it didn't, but I expected a bit more rigorous data analysis from this paper.
Would be curious to see data on this. I most frequently see an emotional appeal against authority, vague anxieties and fears and/or slippery slope arguments.
And covid vaccines being spike-only may be less effective against variants than whole-virus vaccines or actual infections. But flu shots manage to be ineffective a year later with whole viruses in them, so maybe that wouldn’t help.
They are certainly not using a scientific mindset - they are just using language that sounds scientific, so it sounds smart and solid. But is not, when you look closer and try to find their data and sources. But common people does not do that - and fall for it. It is basically fraud, in most instances.
One of my latest memories is the introduction of a test that can be used to test for Corona and flu at the same time. The relevant article headline spoke of a test to distinguish flu from Corona. This then turned into the antivaxxers saying that previous PCR tests could not distinguish corona from flu.
Nor does it evince the collapse of rational thinking. If people just suspended their critical judgement and did whatever they were told unquestioningly, there would also be no antivax movement, but their compliance would not speak to their capacity for rationality, only their bovinity.
Falsely presenting subjective viewpoints as objective would appear more rational. It isn't the trappings which make it rational or even distance from emotions. One can rationally make "non-optimal" decisions from subjective personal costs.
Click on some YTube show and baby won’t bother you for the next hour or two.
A coworker of mine had every intention of not having any screentime for their toddler. But lockdown meant two parents working from home + no daycare. The solutions were either one of them quits their job or they buy an iPad. Economy necessity dictated the latter.
With my toddler, we retained zero screentime simply because my wife is freelance and can get away with ~10 hours of actual work per week.
The entire point of this sub-thread was to analyze the trend pre-lockdown. (FWIW, I'm then not wanting to comment on whether this is lazy behavior or not, but just that this defense is out of place.)
Turns out, it does not destroys them at all. It can actually add quite a lot.
The harm can happen if you overdo it a lot. But some watching or playing is not destroying them at all.
I know this is a poor form but fuck you. We work our asses off to give our kids what is generally accepted as a “good” upbringing and it’s hard. Hard during any normal period of time and even harder when dealing the pressures of the pandemic’s affect on work, day care, extracurricular activities, etc.
Happy to read whatever evidence you have on this topic. I’m keenly interested and sure as shit not “lazy” for allowing our children time to play age appropriate games on a tablet.
Please don't do that here, regardless of how strong and legitimate your feelings are. It only makes things worse.
They just need help to learn to manage those excessive behaviors
That is both name-calling and flamebait, and therefore breaks the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Can you please make your substantive points without doing that? Note this guideline also:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Parenting is one of the most emotionally activating topics that exists, and therefore one of the most divisive.
You can report me and ban, I don’t mind
Appreciate the caution.
We took a different approach.
Unlimited screen time.
Our daughter’s rate of learning is incredible.
She willingly explores IRL play. No battles when we ask her to put down her iPad.
Roblox and Minecraft are our shared playtime.
I was homeschooled with no TV. My experience of her development is similar to what I experienced with my siblings.
A healthy dose of skepticism is warranted when new tech is the explanation for diminishing returns in our existing systems. Children are in aggressively structured, impoverished educational systems nationwide - bankrupt in both their pedagogy and their budgets. Teachers & administrators have raised the warning that as many as 80% of children have not engaged at all with their schooling in the past two years.
Maybe iPads aren’t the problem.
Maybe they are one reason cognitive decline in children isn’t dramatically worse.
What's your household income?
I remember back in the day television was the bad guy in town. I wonder if iPads aren’t much better since they foster interaction and not just dull watching.
You can't devalue that just because abusive parents use similar words. And I doubt that abusive parents have a unique wording so you can't infer abuse from certain phrases.
And my educated guess is: it depends.
If I had to give up either my well paid job today, or my happy childhood playing outside, I would definitely be poor now.
Surprising comment, that this is seen is unusual! I grew up in the 70s-80s (in Australia). 2-3 hours would've been pretty much universal, I think, and more likely to be >3 than <2. And half or more of it really, really bad. I've never admitted to anyone some of those deeply crappy US series from the 80s I watched, and am not starting now! Yeah, I turned out fine.. but all those hours watching crap. The movies/series had ads in them too, a lot of them.
I've been trying to make up for that, by watching just good/great stuff from around the world, no ads, during the last 10 years: see http://www.adamponting.com/movies/
Personally I wonder whether there's a big difference between playing YouTube stimulation videos vs logic puzzle/math/mystery games vs the latest dopamine-addiction-of-day game
It’s been nothing but great!
They turned into information sponges with a huge amount of knowledge about the world, way ahead of their peers.
Our son watches a lot of extrem sports YouTube content which always inspires him to push harder to get better at those sports himself.
He is the only one in his class who will tackle the large half pipes at the local dirt park for example. It’s the result of watching the pro’s do it on YouTube and then practicing relentlessly!
Society has this thing where everything new is stamped as bad…book, bad! Bicycles, bad! Radio, bad!, TV, bad! Computer games, bad! Drugs, bad! Sugar, bad! People are just a bunch of scaredy cats
We ought to provide kids some more nuance about the things in the world
Is there bad things to watch or do on your screens, like scary stuff or things that are incredibly dull…absolutely. But the only way to learn what that is, is to let them experience it and learn.
And: How old is your son and at what age did you start the unlimited screen time policy?
Because as you say, there is more nuance to screen time. It depends on the kid’s personality, the age, the environment, friends, access to outdoor activities etc.
Then something else is wrong. That's not a normal behavior that healthy people do, it's a symptom of some other problem in their life.
Thanks to the pandemic, my son has learned that screens can be boring, and it's not all that exciting anymore after too much time. He's learned to put it down and find something else to do. We don't have to enforce screen time anymore, he mostly does it himself.
Not necessarily. Not when social media and gaming companies hire psychologist PhDs to explicitly entrap children through addictive traits
Not really... games are designed to be incredibly addictive, can be social activities and have much lower physical consequences/withdrawals from misuse. Don't find Rat-Park as a convincing explanation for why high schools boys might prefer Fortnite to Zoom Class.
It’s your job as a parent to provide exposure and teach
If your son hadn't been into BMX/MTB/Cross (are you sure you mean halfpipe?) before the unlimited screen time policy, don't you think he might have ended up obsessed with computer games or youtube instead?
I make fun of him when I think he does something stupid…but it’s in good spirit. My job as a parent is not to manipulate him into the life I think he should live…my job is to enable him to live his!
And Yes, our 5y old takes a full size dirt park half pipe…has done so ever since he has been 3y or so. I wouldn’t do that myself…but he does
He also is into skateboards, snowboards, plays basketball, soccer and what not. He got me into skateboarding at 40…don’t worry though, I wear a helmet :)
In this moment I am watching him race an RC car with 30-40mph across a meadow
Earlier today he was had. oculus headset strapped on and was playing job simulator
> My job as a parent is not to manipulate him into the life I think he should live
That happens to be exactly what your job is. Children don't know what's best for them, that's why they have parents.
How have the kids not been consumed by unlimited screen time? How do you keep them interested in real activities as well?
Unlimited meaning whatever I could find in the house
My wife on the other side grew up not having unlimited access to candy
Guess who of the two of us as adult now can control their candy consumption and who if there is candy in the house will eat every last bit of it with 2/3 days?
Forced limiting of anything won’t teach a person how to deal with it…quite the opposite
To this day a quart of ice cream can last me weeks even when it’s the only treat in the house. But then my wife joins the fray and suddenly it’s like a competition to finish it in one night.
The resulting harm can not be understated.
Minecraft and Roblox are active, creative pursuits, and demand disciplined, logical thinking to achieve goals. Lincoln Logs and Erector Sets for the digital age.
TV demands precisely the opposite. Kids are psychologically rewarded for passive non-thinking. They feel the win when their screen hero beats the villain, even though all they did was just... sit there and consume.
The modern equivalents -- TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, basically any streaming video service -- crank that badness up to about 162, because at least the television programming of yore was finite. You could only watch cartoons and be bombarded with ads for maybe two hours at a time before something more boring and adult came on.
Moreover, parents also knew what their kids were watching, because the TV was in the living room. Nowadays, with personal digital devices, none of that holds.
My family treats smartphones the same way we treat guns: both are powerful and dangerous tools.
I could make a pretty strong case that an iPhone is more dangerous to a toddler than an AR-15.
At the same time, you can't hide your kids from the world and expect them to be able to deal with it. Parents must take responsibility and educate relentlessly. You might start with "don't touch, find an adult", but you're going to finish by teaching your kids to master their tools.
That was true at one point, but it is worth noting that Cartoon Network is about 30 years old now. And even before cable became the dominant TV delivery mechanism, VHS enabled lots of binge watching (and rewatching).
The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets.
The main budgetary problem is bureaucratic. The schools get more than enough money, but the teachers aren't the ones who decide how to spend it, so a teacher who wants more school supplies than are allocated has to pay out of pocket and then we get these anecdotes.
The solution is a combination of two things. First, stop trying to regulate education from the top. Let the individual teachers do it. Provide resources, don't enforce conformity. Second, let the parents choose the teachers, or more realistically, the school. Then you get competition between schools to provide the best education instead of the existing system of like it or lump it. Also, give the same money to the parents who are homeschooling. Homeschool is school and the families doing it shouldn't be financially penalized for choosing something that by most accounts gives better results.
Educational spending covers a different set of domains in the US than it does in other countries. There's a lot of backfill in the social services area, for example.
What we have now is a market-based approach, where the price of admission to a top flight public school system is a $1M mortgage.
* private, which is expensive (and in some cases not a guarantee of quality)
* rich public, which requires probably living in the extremely local school district
* magnet/charter, which usually have whole apparatuses dedicated to securing donor funding similar to how colleges ask former alumni and the wealthy to top up their budgets
* poor public
At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts, but that's kind of hard because a lot of the separate school districts were intentionally set up that way to ensure that socioeconomic classes did not have to share schools in a post-segregation world. Even if you did manage to do it, a lot of people would probably pull out and choose private instead.
But it is absolutely insane that in some states "boundary-hopping" school districts can send parents who want the best for their child to jail. http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/ame...
Large school districts seem to attract their own special blend of problems.
> But it is absolutely insane that in some states "boundary-hopping" school districts can send parents who want the best for their child to jail.
Sounds like fraud, which is generally a jailable offense. Specific details would matter, but what would you expect to happen if you registered to vote with an improper address so you could vote in a different district for some reason? I'd expect some chance of jail.
Right now you have good schools and bad schools and the way to get into the good schools is to have money and pay a lot for a house. The cost is more not because the good school actually costs more to operate, but because "having money" is being used as the admissions criteria, as a heuristic for not being a destructive influence.
It's pretending that public schools don't have any admissions criteria and then having one anyway. But because it's only that one, the market is broken. Dumb rich kids go to the good school and smart poor kids go to the bad school.
We could do the opposite. Give everyone a fixed amount of money for school, untethering the choice of school from your income, and then use anything else as the admissions criteria. Let the school choose its own. The schools with better-than-cheap-heuristic admissions criteria will be the most desirable, but will also accept desirable classmates regardless of parental income, because that's part of what makes it a desirable school.
What we have now is a system where we for the most part try to remove market influences so wealth doesn't advantage/disadvantage children, but with the constant thorn of wealthier parents constantly fighting to have their resources applied to their own children, sometimes without considering what that means overall.
If we could actually separate wealth from public education, maybe we'd actually see some change.
One interesting way might be to allow free bussing up to 10 (or more?) miles for any child, and allow parents to choose whatever school they want. Those wealthier schools in nicer areas will have to start splitting those funds between more and more students. Of course this would never be allowed for long.
Knowing which school is the good school is hardly the problem. It's the one in the good neighborhood where the poor kids can't afford to live. The problem with the status quo is that knowing that doesn't get you into the school, only money does.
> If we could actually separate wealth from public education, maybe we'd actually see some change.
This is the idea of school choice. You give every kid in the state the same amount of money for school and don't gate admission by street address and the poor kid at least has a chance to go to the better school.
You would then end up with admissions criteria like test scores for the better schools, which would have some disparity in them, but how is that worse than the status quo of every rich kid going to the good school and every poor kid going to the bad school? At least there would be a path for getting out of the hole based on something other than having your parents make more money and buy a very expensive house.
And then you can work on improving admissions criteria so that promising students with low income parents get to go to better schools. Or better yet, start your own good school that does exactly this without needing permission from the parents of dumb rich kids who want your slot.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Not only are poorer people less likely to have the time in the morning to get their children to schools farther away, they're also less likely to even have vehicles to do some in some cases.
That's why maybe opening up schools to any student, ignoring criteria such as geography or testing, and providing free bussing to a certain range/degree might be a market approach way to allow those resources to be more evenly spread across children (if the poorer schools have 25% less children each but the richer schools have 50% more children, that might even out some of the funding issues and allow for other reform to take place, such as not using property taxes).
Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities.
As for testing to get into wealthier schools, to some degree that might be a chicken and egg problem. What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another? You could heavily regulate the testing, but I think heavy regulation often leads to people finding and abusing the loopholes. I think I favor lighter regulation (but not the lack of any, for sure), and incentives and disincentives towards desired behavior what are viewed less as a sacrosanct set of rules that must be preserved and more as an ever changing set of nudges to move us towards the outcomes we want.
There is no reason to do this if you have reasonable selection criteria. Right now we're trying to maintain the facade that all public schools accept everyone while not actually doing that in practice. Make the acceptance criteria explicit and you don't need the implicit gating by income.
> What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another?
This is solved by allowing each school to have their own criteria.
The thing parents want isn't actually to put all the rich kids together. It's to put their kid together with the creative kids and not the destructive kids. That might correlate somewhat with rich kids and poor kids, but it's not the same thing. Then schools that do a better job of selecting for what parents really want will be more attractive to all parents than the ones using cheap heuristics like parental income. And then the creative poor kids get to go to the good school.
It also allows schools to specialize. You've got some kids who are in gangs. How about a boarding school which is 20 miles outside the city. The kid stays there all week and only comes home on weekends. A place where the bad kids can turn themselves around, where you remove the kid from existing bad influences for the school week. We already have private schools like that, but the poor families who need them the most can only send their kids to the drug-infested prison-school allocated to the neighborhood they can afford to live in.
supportive parents are the key to success, rich, poor, black, white, asian, Hispanic, gay, strait, etc.
children with rich parents may have more doors opened, and access to things, but proclaim wealth is the only factor or even the biggest factor is false.
unsupported rich parents turn out children that fail all the time, and supportive poor parents turn out children that go on to success.
A support system at home is the biggest determinate for success or failure in life.
The US doesn't regulate education from the top. Japan and France do. US education is very locally controlled.
Then on top of that the federal Department of Education sucks billions of dollars in tax revenue out of everywhere and sends it back with strings attached. This isn't even a majority of the budgets, but it's enough that it hurts to turn the money away, and so you get all the strings.
Whereas actual "local control" would be at the level of an individual school or classroom.
Correct. New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US (<https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...>). Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.
>in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets.
Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives. (<https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...>) Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.
Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.
The good news is, there’s zero cost in changing one’s mind to no longer be racist.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...
She watches YouTube for hours on end, usually 15 second meme videos that alternate between vacant and toxic.
She’s obsessed with memes to the point where it’s impossible for her to hold a conversation with someone who doesn’t have a similar browsing history.
She’s lost a shared common vocabulary with even her closed friends.
Maybe iPads are the problems.
I hope that works itself out for her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok
(Edit: my inner cynic just popped up the question “are you sure she’s not just being a stereotypical teenager?” even though you didn’t mention her age).
And if you haven’t seen the same memes she has, she’ll try to tell you about the YouTube videos she’s watched. If you don’t find this interesting (nobody does), she’ll stop talking to you.
Again, not a teenager. A little girl.
As soon as the iPad/computer was no longer "special" due to time limitations it sort of lost its "power" over him. He was much more open to using it for things other than games and funny videos.
I felt a bit dumb when I realised it was me putting these limits on his use of the iPad and computer that amplified how much "power" they had over his desire to use them.
Obviously there are still some limits but we follow them for ourselves as well (such as no screen time before bed, taking breaks every hour) so they haven't been an issue.
I certainly don't think the devices are the problem but more how we give these devices so much power over kids by holding this magical machine in front of them that can do so damn much then restrict access to them so all they ever want to do is very basic things like game.
Back in 9th grade when I was 14 or 15, we had a substitute teacher who was just out of college and our regular teacher hadn't prepared any sort of lesson plan for her, so instead of doing what we were supposed to we somehow got into a long conversation about adulthood.
The part that's always stuck with me is when one of the other students asked something like, "now that it's legal you must get drunk all the time, right?", and she described the same thing you did here about screens: All the allure was from it being forbidden, and once she was legally allowed to drink she just didn't care anymore.
Oof. A teachable moment for the instructors hopefully becomes one for the student. Good teachers are amazing; bad ones are horrible at both teaching and learning from their students.
Person posts negatively to the research and they never look at p valued or sample sizes. Also, they disregard any other possible research .
Then a few to a hundred posts refuting the parent with anecdotal evidence of both positive and negative outcomes especially when science doesn’t work in anecdotal evidence which is the point of science and it basically shows that they didn’t read the story either.
The big problem is that science isn’t one sided. That papers are cherry picked from preprints or even Confrence and journals where one out of ten papers in a Confrence or a journal publication refute the article regardless.
In the parent they suggest a greater trend spanning 2017 onward which isn't being mentioned. Large or small p value isn't the issue here
In figure 2, the authors argue that there is a trend. But the graph seems to show the direct measurements of dependent variables with confidence intervals, and they are all non-significant. This means that there is no reason to talk about a trend, especially if the difference between significant and non-significant is not significant :)
[edit]: Would really have loved if they showed marginal effects here, removing the influence of control variables.
But the models themselves do something else: Table 3 suggests that covid was used as a binary variable to test for. So they are comparing pre-covid to covid-time and see a significant result there.
Methodologically, it doesn't seem like a bad design, but the sample size is really a bit small to have sufficient power.
Apart from that, the effect size of covid (31) seems really high, but developmental psychology is not my field so I can't say anything about that.
From the Figure 2 caption, I'm pretty sure it's showing standard deviations (of the sample) not 95% confidence intervals (of the mean). Two samples may have overlapping ± 1 s.d. intervals despite having significant different means.
These kids are a maximum of two years old. It's not like they're sitting down with math worksheets. From my (limited) understanding, most cognitive assessments in children that age have to do with responsiveness to stimuli.
It would help to know what they're testing specifically, and if it could be something extremely specific to the test that's being impacted by common covid practices, rather than the child's cognitive development as a whole.
https://www.pearsonassessments.com/store/usassessments/en/St...
"The Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) is a standardized assessment that is commonly used in clinical psychology as a developmental measure of cognitive development (Mullen, 1989, 1995). The MSEL is organized into 5 subscales: (a) gross motor, (b) fine motor, (c) visual reception (or non-verbal problem solving), (d) receptive language, and (e) expressive language. An early learning composite score can be derived from fine motor, visual reception, receptive language, and expressive language scales. For young children this early learning composite score is considered equivalent to a more traditional “IQ” score or a developmental standard score." (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/mullen-scale...)
I doubt this will prove an accurate measurement of their general cognitive development over time. Once the children are exposed to unmasked people with the frequency that used to be considered normal, their skills in that area will probably catch up...assuming what was previously considered "normal" ever does return.
My own daughter was born in late Jan 2020 so I think we dodged the fetal exposure issue but perhaps socialization impacts may be substantial (although at her age, her peers do not wear masks and some daycare providers have worn clear spit shields rather than masks; nonetheless I think she has socialized less than she would have a few years previously, but more than kids who don't go to daycare).
[1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/th...
[2]: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10....
Resources spent fighting disease aren't spent on development? Idk though this is pure uninformed speculation
It is probably hard to control for "being poor", since it correlates with both lesser pay and education and I guess getting sick.
CDQ is designed to correlate with age[1] and it's expected that the most recently born children have lower scores. Just treating age as a model covariate seems wrong? Shouldn't they do some kind of propensity score matching (match equally old childs with comparable maternal education, weight, etc.)? instead?
I also really doubt that a verbal development assessment already makes sense for children born after March 2020 (or you would have to limit the sample to children born in March/April 2020 and assessed just now)?
Would be nice if someone who is more experienced with this data + methodology can comment on that...
The wealthy kids have that opportunity. Kids with natural social skills may be fine too.
However, kids with two parents that are working 4 jobs won't reach their full potential. Many kids already have issues from this; and it's awful that their voices and their parents voices - and their psychologists voices - aren't being heard.
Myself, I find it abhorrent that people are casually brushing aside a clear major developmental impact on an entire generation of growing children. The cost benefit ratio seems awfully bad.
I am unaware of a single family, anywhere on the planet, that was "decimated" by Covid. I hope you really mean "devastated," because then at least you'd be making some semblance of sense.
Also, to ignore that there are studies and experts that back their opinion is a little rich. Sure, you can say you think your studies and your experts are better, but to assume those who disagree with you are "idiots" is, again, pretty over-the-top, and exactly the sort of thing someone can point to and say: "Look, these pro-maskers are projecting."
Why not try to be a little more understanding and share some of this knowledge with people? Do you really need to stoop so low?
Then perhaps this is a good time to start paying attention to your surroundings.
In the short term, it's a detriment; they will have to struggle more and will encounter more difficulties in socialization. But that's not necessarily a Unique problem, there have always been kids with these kinds of problems, if not at this rate. And on this short term we're decreasing mortality from covid and hopefully keeping hospital resources available to minimize mortality from other causes.
Over the long term, decreased mortality is generally a net societal gain. An increase of people with issues socializing will result in an increase in the market for solutions, tools, community, and support that help with this kind of problem. These solutions would help both the pandemic babies And those who would normally struggle, and would be available to future generations too!
The Point is that in the short term there's an increase in the number of people who have trouble socializing, but in the long term society develops better support systems and tools to help people who have trouble socializing, because there's an increased need. These tools help both people who developed problems as a result of the pandemic, And people who would Normally have problems socializing not just now but in the future as well.
How this is not national news 24/7? It is a disaster. So much about protecting the children…
At least for covid, this has never been about protecting the children, mostly about protecting old people. I remember a classmate calling it "sacrificing the mental health of the youth for the physical health of the old".
I would expect less physical movement overall (bad), more respiratory issues from over-wearing masks, anxiety manifesting as physical issues, and a host of other second order effects.
And let's not forget that poorer kids worldwide are facing less access to dentists and other preventative medicine overall. That people are letting this stuff slide while 'health' companies post record profits is maddening.
But yes in summer the only real upside is getting to dress like a bank robber.
Regardless, having overflowing hospitals is bad for children and every other age group.
I'll add a point that might sound very bad, but I think it has to be taken into account. In the country where I live, France, people between ~20 and ~60 years old pay for the healthcare and retirement of mostly everyone else. That means that if someone was 22 at the start of covid, and in their last 2 years of studies, they had a hard time to protect people 60+ years old. Then, for the next 20 years, they're going to pay the healthcare and the retirement of those people. Considering that the fertility is getting lower and lower in France, I think this is a very dangerous strategy for the long-term stability of public expanses.
We are in a democracy, and we didn't get any choice in how covid was handled. In France the mean age is 42 years old, the median age is 41 years old [1]. The mean age in the Assemblée Nationale is 51 years old [2]. It's also the mean age of the current governement [3]. The mean age of mayors is 58 years old [4]. All of that makes me think that there might be a bias to protect older people, and that some of the decision taken came from that.
[1]: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2381476
[2]: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/vos-deputes
[3]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouvernement_Jean_Castex
[4]: https://www.amf.asso.fr/documents-la-carte-didentite-maires-...
And those in institutions still spend tons amount of time at home.
So I disagree with your point entirely. And I've provided even more reasoning than you did about why today's children will be even better at social conduct than their predecessors.
I bet a similar delaying effect is happening for adolescent kids who would have started being interested in the opposite sex but all they could do was Zoom into virtual lectures while being alone.
So in your opinion, attending class is about finding a heterosexual romantic partner?
I know lots of teenagers had virtual lectures, but I don't know any teenagers who were 100% socially isolated from their peers for very long.
> Overall, we find that measured verbal, non-verbal, and overall cognitive scores are significantly lower since the beginning of the pandemic. Looking further, we find that children born before the pandemic and followed through the initial stages do not show a reduction in skills or performance, but rather that young infants born since the beginning of the pandemic show significantly lower performance than in- fants born before January 2019. Thus, our results seem to suggest that early development is impaired by the environmental conditions brought on by the pandemic.
Enjoy life and be gentle with each other, that's the performance that matters.
The risk of developmental issues was obvious to many people at the beginning of the lockdowns. Now we have some data. It will help us make better decisions in the future.
Every choice has consequences.
I "love" how you and the comment below can take a "be gentle with each other" comment and turn it into a springboard for your anti-lockdown rhetoric.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
You don't even need a study for this, it's just common sense for people who have interacted with a toddler in their life before and after nursery (after 2-3 years old, I wouldn't recommend sending them before - they tend to not be ready for social life and not having one dedicated adult to them)
Lots of common sense things turn out to be false, and the plural of anecdote is not data. We absolutely need studies.
Even "Long Covid" sounds a lot like undiagnosed depression or chronic fatigue syndrome.
In the COVID-19 pandemic means we're talking about 2yr old toddlers and younger. Assessing toddler's cognitive abilities is not trivial by any means, let alone using it as a basis for far-fetched projections. So first thing that comes to mind is sampling approach.
Also a factor is a degree of social interaction, as it got harder to keep kids in peer groups esp. during the lockdowns and work from home stretches.
Either way, at this age 'performance' is almost meaningless term. There's plenty of ways and time to 'catch-up'.
"...Since 2011, 1224 cognitive assessments were collected from 672 healthy, full-term, and neurotypically-developing children between 3 months to 3 years of age. Repeated measures were separated by at least 1 year (mean = 384 +/- 41 days). A general overview of all child assessment timings are shown in Figure 1a. This dataset included 1070 assessments (from 605 children) prior to March 2020; 154 assessments (from 118 children) between March 2020 and June 2021; with 39 children who were born just prior to the pandemic in 2018 and 2019, and following during the pandemic to 2021..."
The cognitive assessment tool:
40. E.M., M., Mullen Scales of Early Learning. 1995, Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Services, Inc.
The age of the kids 'born during pandemic' in this context is up to 18months, not clear how many in count, but total is 39 born from 2018 to 2021. Pandemic start considered March 2020.
P.S. As for the Mullen Scales, citing from [1]:
"...Motivation can affect test results; therefore it is important to enhance motivation as much as possible in young children without affecting standardized procedures of the assessment (Koegel, Koegel, & Smith, 1997).
...
When young children refuse to attempt test items it can be difficult to determine their current level of functioning..."
[1]: Use of the Mullen Scales of Early Learning for the Assessment of Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1550495/
Yeah I don’t think the goals have been clear, even if they have been changing over time. I think the clearest goal now should be a 90% vaccination rate to turn Covid into the common cold, and then going back to life as normal, but as long as huge swathes of the population refuse to get vaccinated this goal is unattainable.
Edit: I believe Biden actually set a 70% vax goal for July 2021, and we missed it. No way we can hit 90%. I think possibly for anti-vaxers their goal is simply to not be told what to do and if they end up in an overwhelmed hospital so be it.
So I suggest you reassess whether meeting that goal in your location would result in things going back to normal for you.
The other problem is that just hitting the % isn’t good enough. You need to keep up to date if boosters are required. So definitely not easy.
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1063830104/portugal-covid-vac...
https://m.dw.com/en/covid-19-special-vaccination-champion-po...
1. It is a "wimpy" thing to admit to. People are reluctant to think things about themselves which, if admitted aloud, could earn social ridicule.
2. One fear can prompt another and lead to an anxiety spiral which is too overwhelming for someone to even put into words.
Conjecture: The best way to measure it would be to introduce a nasal spray and see what sort of uptick it earns.
The urge to resist force is a vital element of US culture as a check on runaway governments. You see it in many movements, on both sides for or against. Women don't want to be forced to carry a baby. LGBT community doesn't want to be forced to hide. Christians don't want to be forced to stop praying in school. Non-Christians don't want to be forced to listen to prayers in school.
Everyone should be persuaded to get vaccinated for things like flu and COVID. Very few people should be forced to do so just to keep their jobs.
No one is strapping people down and injecting them with a vaccine, it’s not a forced medical procedure. However the involvement in certain activities by the unvaccinated is limited and this is similar to many other public health orders such as not being able to smoke inside a restaurant.
There are also other ways to limit the spread of viruses apart from vaccination, like testing, distancing, masks, ventilation, etc. There should be a gradient of choice, maybe with triage nurses at the "almost definitely need to vaccinate" end, and payroll processors at the "almost definitely would be okay with regular testing and/or other standard measures" end.
As a libertarian that is actually concerned with freedom, the main thing the Trumpertantrum has accomplished is discrediting the concept. Back when it was a small subset of antivax nutters, causing at most an occasional localized outbreak, I had sympathy for people's right to make their own bad decisions. Now the political machine took up the banner and created a force majeure situation, so I'm just done.
My personal view (please don't be offended, libertarians -- it's my right to believe this!) is that individuality itself is a bit of a fiction, and this makes libertarianism essentially based on falsehood and break down. We're interconnected.
The best argument for individuality in politics and government, in my view, is that it gives "the average person" a fair shot, giving us good outcomes at the societal level even if many individuals do not get what they want.
There is also international travel as a point - the vaccine isn’t available at will everywhere, so there’s some being a good neighbor in slowly the general spread of the vaccine as well.
1 - The obvious one, everybody (or close enough to everybody) gets partial immunity either through vaccination or through actually catching it. Variants are making this a moving target, unfortunately.
2 - Somebody comes up with and mass manufactures a good-enough therapeutic that can keep sick people out of the hospitals. To this end I’m very hopeful for the new Pfizer drug.
2. I would really like to see a proper, large RCT of ivermectin, HCQ+zinc, and the new Pfizer therapeutic. The latter costs $700 per course, apparently, and many countries won’t be able to afford it. And, exclude hospitalized patients, we’re trying to find out how to keep people out of the hospital!
I hadn't thought about this explicitly but I'd also say this is most of the problem. Working in academia, some facet of our policies changes on a daily basis in knee-jerk reactions. Worse yet, my area of research is infectious disease and I imagine this must be how climate scientists feel when policy decisions just get drawn out with no goal.
Any less than this, and you'll lock down again.
What makes you think it hasn’t? I’m sure all lockdown decision makers are looking at these models along with models of hospital capacity.
> People say "things are pretty much back to normal" but parents with kids in school know this is not true.
My kids school life has basically gone back to normal and has been all year. It’s my WFH situation that is never “going back to normal” but I think that’s a positive.
Do they have to wear masks? Do they have to socially distance?
I have no way of quantifying any of this but there's just tons of little things that have the potential to be negative impacts to his long term success. Even if my kids cope, I worry about their peers and the worrying trends in academic test data compared to previous cohorts.
Do you have expert knowledge, or at least experience with lots of different 2 year olds, to make such a statement?
Because I got some experience and I can tell you, there are great differences to be meassured for sure.
Whether they meassured correctly, I do not know, but I can imagine that the chaos of the pandemic was not always helpful for child developement. Just alone the social contacts are vital for developing - and they were greatly reduced (often replaced with screen time) compared to normal 2 year olds.
Honestly, I'd suspect that parents are around kids more and noticing and reporting more.
This illustrates pretty well the absolute massive difference in how people experience the pandemic. People with kids in school and people certain types of jobs is hit extremely hard. Some absolutely struggle with home schooling, being out of a job, feeling isolated and a myriad of other issues. For others, like myself, other than having to work from home some of the time, and getting regularly tested, the whole thing has made some aspects of life much much easier. The only downside, for both me and my wife, is that there's more work to be done than ever.
I've checked out my year averages for 2019, 2020 and 2021, they were 5, 3.4 and 5.2 km per day. 2020 average is 2/3 of my usual per day walk distance. I try to average 5 km/day in an effort to lessen cognitive decline, because walking rises brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) level in the blood. BDNF can travel umblical cord and can enhance baby's brain development.
So, mothers walking less due to lockdowns is the simplest explanation for that cognitive impairment phenomena I could think of.
They changed their methods in 2020, so they can’t attribute this to their methods or other indirect effects of the pandemic.
Says it all. Take it with a huge grain of salt.
i will say that fear or how we handle fear can mess up learning, it’s kind of hard to take the basics seriously when the message being sent out is one of impending doom. we go into survival mode which forces us to make snap decisions in order to ensure safety. fight or flight response. our amygdala plays a huge part in learning and memory recall/storage
"In this work, therefore, we specifically sought to explore individual and population-level trends in infant and early child neurodevelopment. Analyses of cognitive development, assessed using Mullen Scales of Early Learning [40], a population normed and clinically administered tool that assesses function across the five primary domains of fine and gross motor control, visual reception, and expressive and respective language via direct observation and performance, provides some of the first direct evidence of the developmental impact of the COVID-19 pandemic."
From https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/mullen-scale...
"The Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) is a standardized assessment that is commonly used in clinical psychology as a developmental measure of cognitive development (Mullen, 1989, 1995). The MSEL is organized into 5 subscales: (a) gross motor, (b) fine motor, (c) visual reception (or non-verbal problem solving), (d) receptive language, and (e) expressive language. An early learning composite score can be derived from fine motor, visual reception, receptive language, and expressive language scales. For young children this early learning composite score is considered equivalent to a more traditional “IQ” score or a developmental standard score."
See Figure 2 of the paper, on page 31.
Apparently, "[t]he outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the associated economic shut-down, school disruptions, and social distancing, stay-at-home, and mask policies" has reduced the intelligence of newborns and young children by ~1.5 standard deviations.
We should do something about heart diseases or car accidents which are far more worrisome for parents.
> approximately 1 out of 500 children in the United States has experienced COVID-19-associated orphanhood or death of a grandparent caregiver
Those are all caregivers , not just any grandparent.
Nothing about that paper inspires confidence.
Blatant, blatant, family-level confounding is driving this. Having kids dropped like a stone in covid, because who would be so irresponsible as to have a child during a pandemic? During lockdown? And with global warming the way it is? (The opening of _Idiocracy_ is justly famous.) So, who then is having kids...?
It's like maternal smoking. If you look at kids with mothers who smoke vs the kids with mothers who don't smoke, the latter are healthier and more functional; however, if you look at siblings whose mother smoked during one sibling's pregnancy but not the other's, they are often identical. That's because what you are measuring is the effect of 'having a mother who will smoke', not the effect of 'smoking'.
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/36/e2105709118
There were statistically insignificant increases in Slovenia, Norway, Denmark, South Korea, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland.
Going by this, I also think that you may have the correlation wrong. If the study is correct (more generous welfare systems => less decrease in birth rates), that seems like it would mean that people who can afford it will keep having kids.
Granted, so will people who aren't in the planning business. But it's hardly cut-and-dry like that.
(extra confounder: Northern Europe had less harsh lockdowns, maybe that plays a role?)
“Statistically insignificant” means that you have data from a sample from which, at the desired level of confidence, you cannot be sure of any effect, or that there was not the reverse effect, in the universe from which the sample is drawn.
It does not matter direction what the relationship is, only that it exists at the family level and so family-level correlations are non-causal for the effect of coronavirus as claimed by OP. We should be equally skeptical for the same reason if the result had instead came out as "kids during coronavirus have 10 higher IQ points because their parents played with them more thanks to remote working and subsidies"; there is no reason to believe that changes in childbearing during coronavirus has been, in any place, exogenous and randomized, and we know that pretty much all of these relationships are partially to completely confounded, thanks to studies which do include family controls (like all the Scandinavian population registry studies which exploit siblings). The burden of proof is on anyone who wants to argue that their correlation is the one special snowflake immune to this general trend, and should be taken at 100% face value.
Did nobody proofread this before it was published?
Can anyone speak to the robustness of these Mullen Scales? Especially in the 0-2 age group?
It's almost impossible to deduce, due to this paper's horrid formatting.
I'm not convinced that any measures of cognitive performance are going to be useful that early
I think you got it exactly backwards. Politicians have successfully scapegoated themselves via epidemiologists (who's first and last consideration is to minimize infections) and people who refuse vaccination (even though the vaccinated are still just as epidemiologically relevant.)
Epidemiologists look only at the pandemic aspect. Politicians should look at the economy, the welfare, the general health, the strategic issues, and more. If you really think that an epidemiologist's response will account for things like mental health of toddlers you are mistaken.
I know that politicians have a bad name today but they are still elected officials who have an incentive (elections) to do what's best for the country as a whole.
Just to clarify- it was epidemiologists who pushed, understandably from their point of view, for the same lockdowns you define overreaching. It was mostly politicians who were the most reluctant to apply them. And the pressure in this direction was mostly from populism (Trump, Bolsonaro...), and from the finance/treasure ministries which feared the economy crisis.
Those aren't the same. The vast majority of politicians will almost always favor short-term "free candy!" decisions that they know will be popular with their base come election time, rather than make difficult decisions that would actually improve the quality of life for their constituents over even the slightly-longer term.
Possibly there is sampling bias with the podcasts I’m listening to and the people going on them.
Cause these are year and half or so old at max.
Back in September 2020, there was a big campaign in the UK press to get everyone back to work. Celebrities posed next to quotes saying you'd lose your job if you didn't go back to the office. The works. Many people went.
We chose to re-open universities, too, even though the movement of students back and forth between home and dorms was likely to be a constant flood of superspreader events.
We could have chosen to keep nurseries and primary schools open during much of the pandemic, and avoided crushing women under domestic work (which is now well documented) while harming the development of children by pulling them out of stimulating environments designed to help nurture them.
We always had a budget for transmission that varied by age group, and we decided to blow that budget on students and workers at the expense of children.
As a society, our choices and priorities are absolutely ghastly. Lockdowns were and still are right, but not for children.
More intelligent people would recognize the potential downsides to reproducing in a pandemic, such as (a) unknown effects of the novel coronavirus on the developing fetus, and (b) the role of excessive population density in fueling the pandemic. These more intelligent parents would tend to make the logical decision to avoid reproducing in adverse circumstances.