Fears children born during lockdown are years behind as they start at school
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But surely talking to any adult would do most of the job. All these children brought up by one foreign-speaking parent who end up speaking that language fluently show that. Were these "lockdown children" just left on their own? Or is it indicative that their parents don't talk to them, and their only language learning happened outside of home?
Not to mention their parents were most likely working from home and not free to play with their kids most of the time.
There’s absolutely no substitute for kids seeing kids their age do things.
It's not uncommon for a first child in rural families to not socialize with other children until they start kindergarten and they generally don't end up years.
In discussion, most people associate lockdowns directly with the wider Covid response.
The subhead expands and explains, drawing in the "world of masks and remote health visits has created a generation at risk of social and emotional difficulties".
I know a few folks whose children went through this. They figured out that they should get their children together in super tiny groups (less than 6 but generally no more than 4) with a single teacher. They tried schooling at home but the "mode switch" was too difficult for their young children to understand.
Guess what? Those children are now so far ahead of their peers it is ridiculous.
Education is almost always dependent upon resource.
The disparity in outcomes from the COVID generation is going to be drastic in 15-20 years.
Early childhood development is critical for both social stability and basic morality [0][1]
Also, as an anecdote, my mom works as a Low/Med Track Special Ed Teacher, and most students in the Low/Med track tend to be from broken homes not conducive to learning, leading to a cycle of poverty.
Poverty is directly correlated to lack of parental intervention, due to time and monetary constraints, which leads to a vicious cycle.
[0] - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29362/w293...
[1] - https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/Comprehensive-early...
In the US this is the job of local government, though the federal DoE does it's part (eg. Special Ed faculty salaries are underwritten by the Federal DoE).
There is increased support for these kinds of policies across the aisles through a mix of "early childhood equity" (D leaning) and "increased fertility" (R leaning) policies and talking points.
Because local governments in the US have vastly different resources (and potential talent pools), I think those words may be a nice way to admit "it's a structural issue that shan't be addressed anytime soon".
Intelligence is genetically determined to a significant extent.
Smart people figure out workarounds. Smart people have smart kids. Smart kids are ahead of other kids.
Did the workaround cause them to be ahead? Or did having a genetic lineage that produced the workaround cause it?
However, lots of socioeconomic cohort studies show that the smartest of the lowest quintile rarely do as well as the weakest of the upper quintile.
Intelligence may be genetically inherited, but how far you go with it is almost completely dependent upon the resources around you.
For sure across an entire lifespan and within our society, what you do with it has a huge influence. And, intelligence often works against you since the more intelligent you are the more alienated you are from a larger percent of the population and this can cause a lot of psychological issues that work against “productivity” and “success”.
But for young kids I’m pretty sure intelligence and school performance are very correlated, much more so than peak income and intelligence for example. Schmoozing ability doesn’t get you far on a long division test.
A child can have a really high intelligence, but its usage will be compromised if they're always hungry, always sleepy from being saddled with taking care of siblings or afraid of being abused. A child can have lower intelligence but this can be buttressed by spending lots of extra time and tutors which the upper classes have in abundance.
One of the teachers I knew used to have a wag saying: "When you do wrong when you're poor, you get called thick and can look forward to jail. When you do wrong when you're rich, you get forcibly tutored until you're not an embarassment. When you do wrong when you're middle class, you get called ADHD so everybody can ignore you."
The way I see this is - intelligence is genetically determined, but success is determined by behavior, not intelligence. Intelligence just enables more adaptive behavior selection, all else being equal. Environmental factors can inject behavior patterns that override whatever analytic potential a person has. Which I think basically lines up with what you are saying.
> Her charity has found 1.9 million children in the UK – one in five – are struggling with speech and language. The problem had already been building before the pandemic, especially in disadvantaged areas.
Similarly you can't learn to write code very well from watching videos of someone watching code, especially when they're not trying to teach code through the video.
The social understanding that children develop by playing with other children is vital as well, and hanging out with other dirty little snot-faced kids is a hugely important part of developing a robust immune system.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2022/12/04/does-your-immune-system-nee...
[2] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2557:_Immunity
Exposure to disease allows us to respond to more dangerous related diseases - if this weren't true vaccination never would have worked.
We (I say we) used cowpox to immunise against smallpox.
But imagine being 4 years behind when you hit secondary/senior school. Either the child has to adjust and catch up (but it's a /lot/ to catch up), or the school system has to adjust to accommodate (which is far from easy).