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Comment by purrcat259 | Hacker News Reader

My first was six weeks old when lockdown hit. She spent nearly the first two years of her life with just my wife and I.

We always resolved to speak to her as an adult would and only used YouTube videos which encouraged speech and some signing (look up Miss Rachel to get an idea).

She's now way ahead of most of her peers in terms of speech. I'm sometimes still surprised with how she manages to communicate with us.

Just my n=1 experience.

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Very similar experience here. My daughter got a ton of 1:1 time during lockdowns and now speaks a lot more articulately than other kids her age (sometimes even a few years older). I suspect this study is more about how people used the lockdown to either spend more or less time with their kids.

that is great (no sarcasm) - but I also don't think it is unusual for a <2 year old to spend almost all time with just one or both of the parents. I think the kids that had already in school that were the most affected.

My daughter was born 6 months into the lockdowns. At her 15 months checkup, the doctors were seriously concerned that she wasn't speaking at least 5 words (she had 3 down). They believed that she might have trouble hearing and wanted to refer her for more testing. I told them that her hearing was just fine and that testing wasn't necessary. "How could you be sure?", they argued. I told them that she has no problem paying attention and reacting to her dad and I when spoken to. I told them that she has favourite songs that she loved to dance to and that she could hear them when the music was being played in different rooms, let alone different floors in our house. They weren't convinced and started gaslighting me into enrolling her into testing, telling me that the wait to see any specialist was at least 3 months and the longer I waited the worst the issue would be and that my daughters ability to hear properly was solely resting on my decision to not to refer her. I then asked the doctor and nurse if they had children (which I knew they didn't, just by observing how they interacted with my daughter). They confirmed that they didn't and I proceeded to tell them that my parental instinct trumps their authority on the issue. Long story short, she doesn't shut up now. She's leaps and bounds ahead of her peers when it comes to vocabulary and she loves music and dancing.

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