“The simple fact of being in utero for a very stressful period had development effects on infants,” Dani Dumitriu, pediatrician and neuroscientist at Columbia University and president of an ongoing study on newborns on Pandemic newborn, told NPR. “They were not important effects, but it was a very worrying sign since so many women gave birth during this period.”
Dumitriu’s research, published in 2022, revealed that 6-month-old infants born in the first months of the pandemic had slightly lower scores than screening for their raw engine, their final and personal social skills, compared to a historic cohort of infants born before the start of the Cavid-19 pandemic.
“We are talking about things as a baby who can sit, a baby being able to look for things, perhaps engaging in a face-to-face interaction, very fundamental things,” she said, explaining that mothers have fulfilled a standard development questionnaire providing study data.
But, said Dumitriu, as they continued to follow these children and widen the study to include more pre-countryic children, they found that the babies sivants quickly caught up. “The good news is that it seems that this trend is really limited to the early pandemic phase of 2020 and did not continue after this year.”
“The brain of a child is extraordinarily plastic or malleable,” she said. “One of the important things in the development of the child is that what is happening at 6 months is not predictive of what is happening at 24 months and that it is not predictive of what is happening at 5 years.”
Eli Journey
Sussman said these parallel results parallel to his family experience. As working parents, Sussman and her husband enrolled Eli in daycare at 11 months. He has since been enrolled in nursery school and pre-K. He seemed to meet all the measures established, but at around 2 years old, Sussman realized that Eli did not speak at the level that his mom’s applications told him that he should be. “There was certainly a certain number of words that you should know at a certain time and he did not know them,” she said.
A 2023 study published in Epic research noted that children who had 2 years between October and December 2021 were approximately 32% more likely to have a diagnosis of delay in speech than those who had 2 years in 2018. This rate increased spectacular, up to almost 88%, for children who had 2 between January and March 2023. Overall, speech delay diagnostics increased from 9% of children in 2018 to almost 17% in the first quarter of 2023.
Sussman immediately asked for help and scored Eli in speech therapy, where she was relieved to learn that it was a common problem. “The speech therapist said that they had seen an increase in the number of children coming to speech therapy. Probably due to the lack of exposure to mouths and facial expressions, because it is a large part of the way you learn to speak.”
As Eli was 3 years old “he was so much more verbal and really in an ideal place,” said Sussman.
Pandemic behaviors and habits that can express problems for kindergarten children
Other effects of subsequent pandemic and social dissemination practices have led to persistent and potentially prejudicial behaviors in children, which may appear in kindergarten or later, according to Dumitriu.
Among the most important, there is parental stress, said Dumitriu. “Many studies around the world show that there is a very well described intergenerational effect of maternal stress during pregnancy on developing children,” she said.
Children also spent more time on screens during locking than in a pre-countryic world and which can make them less ready for the school, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Michelle Yang, resident doctor from Children’s Hospital of Orange County who studied screen time in children, said that there were many dangers associated with television electronic devices for children from 2 to 5 years old. “Exposing children at this age at two to three hours of screen time has shown an increased probability of behavioral problems, bad vocabulary and delayed milestones. This is particularly true for children with special needs, ”she wrote in an article providing guidelines to parents.
The levels of school attendance and preschool registrations have also suffered from the pandemic. The most recent study of the American Department of Education on Attendance has revealed that the rate of chronic absenteeism-that is to say when students are missing 10% or more from school-on average 28% across the country during the 2022-2023 school year.
The results of changes in behavior and habits are reflected in test results, Kristen Huff, measure responsible for Curriculum Associates, a company that provides national level tests, told NPR.
“Since the school returned after the pandemic, even students who were not at school because they were too young to be in kindergarten during (location) come in kindergarten behind or less prepared rather than their pre-countryic peers,” said Huff.
According to the apprenticeship report of the state of the student’s state of the company, the 5 -year percentage that arrives at kindergarten in reading has decreased by 8 points since 2019 – from 89% to 81%. The drops are even more important in mathematics. Only 70% of kindergarten students test at the expected level, compared to the 2019 cohort, which was 84% in 2019. The disparities are even deeper when issued by breed and income. Since 2023, the majority black and majority Hispanic schools have continued to show a regular increase in test results in most classes, but their test results remain well below their white counterparts. The same goes for students whose families live with income below $ 50,000 per year compared to those who live above $ 75,000 per year.
The good news, Huff said is that students are making progress. But although they increase at rates comparable to pre-countryic, improvement is not sufficient to compensate for the academic ground that has been lost, she added.
“This is why we have to focus on this acceleration in the rhythm they learn,” said Huff.
Like Dumitriu, Huff focuses on the malleability of the children’s brain as well as the expertise of educators. They just need good resources.
