How The Pandemic Is Shaping Children's Brains

Insights from three months of research.

This is the paid edition of Is My Kid the Asshole?, a newsletter from science journalist, professional speaker and author Melinda Wenner Moyer, which you can read more about here. If you like it, please subscribe and/or share this post with someone else who would too.

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In October, editors at Nature magazine reached out to me. They asked if I might like to dig into the emerging research on how the pandemic is shaping young children’s brains and write a piece that synthesizes what we know (and don’t know). Of course, I said yes — this is an issue I’ve been thinking about a lot. Beyond the question of how the virus might be affecting kids, there’s the bigger question of how the pandemic environment itself might be affecting kids’ development. Children’s — and parents’ — lives have been so different over these past two years, and it’s possible that these differences could be shaping how kids grow and develop.

So I took on the assignment, and the piece was published last week (it’s not behind a paywall right now, so read it while you can!). Here, I’d like to unpack four of my key findings and discuss the implications for parents, teachers and other caregivers.

These are the four main points I’m going to unpack in detail below:

1. The pandemic may be causing developmental delays in some kids.

2. There are a few reasons why some kids might be falling behind.

3. These findings don’t mean that every child is falling behind or developing differently, or that they can’t catch up.

4. Reassuringly, face masks don’t seem to be affecting child development in a concerning way.

   

   Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

OK, so let’s dig in.

1. The pandemic may be causing developmental delays in some kids.

Many child development labs closed during the pandemic and are only just re-opening. So we don’t have nearly as many studies as we might like at this point, and many of the studies we do have are not yet peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals.

Still, a couple of studies suggest that some babies and toddlers might be lagging behind in their development right now.

In one pre-print that’s under review at JAMA Pediatrics, researchers at Brown University invited babies into their lab to track their emerging skills as part of a seven-year-long National Institutes of Health study. They continued to do these assessments during the pandemic, but noticed that it was taking the babies longer to complete the work than it had in the past. When they compared the data they were collecting from babies during the pandemic to the data they’d collected from babies before the pandemic, they found the pandemic-born babies scored almost two standard deviations lower (about a 22 point IQ drop) on developmental tests compared with the others.

Boys seemed to be affected more than girls, and gross motor skills (sitting up, crawling, and walking) seemed to be the most affected. “Things just began sort of falling off a rock the tail end of last year and the beginning part of this year,” said medical biophysicist Sean Deoni, the lead author on these studies, when we spoke for my piece.

In another study out of Columbia University, which has just been published in JAMA Pediatrics, researchers analyzed how birth parents assessed their 6-month-old babies’ development during the pandemic and before the pandemic. They found that pandemic-born babies scored lower on tests that reflected their emerging gross motor and fine motor skills as well as communication skills.

Before you freak out: We need a LOT more data before we can be sure what’s going on. These are just two studies, and yes, they are worrying — but everyone I spoke to said that there is no reason to panic. Many kids may be doing just fine (and even thriving, if their parents are home more, or they’re having more opportunities to engage with siblings). And even if some kids are falling behind, there are things we can do to help them catch up — these kinds of delays certainly aren’t permanent. More on this below.

2. There are a few reasons why some kids might be falling behind.

As is often the case in science, figuring out the why behind a phenomenon can be difficult. And when it comes to the pandemic’s effects on young kids, there could be a number of things going on.

First, kids may not be having as many enriching interactions with adults and peers right now as they usually do. One study found, for instance, that young kids who attended some form of group childcare during the pandemic showed fewer developmental delays than kids who didn’t attend childcare. Babies and toddlers also may not be getting as much gross motor practice as usual because they’re not toddling around on playgrounds with other kids. Parents may be so busy and frazzled that they’re not talking to their kids as much as they usually do, too. Deoni and his team have recorded parent-child interactions at home, finding that the number of words spoken by parents to their children, and vice versa, over the past two years has been lower than in previous years.

Another consideration is stress during pregnancy. Being pregnant during a pandemic is an immensely stressful experience — there are so many worries and concerns, and on top of that, pregnant parents may not have access to the social supports they usually do from childcare classes and friends. Emerging research suggests that babies born to pregnant people who experience a lot of stress during pregnancy have slightly different brain structures, and that these structures might play a role in how they develop. Other research finds that babies born to stressed-out parents behave differently than other babies do, too, in that they are harder to soothe and have shorter attention spans. (If you’re worried that you were too stressed during your pregnancy, read on for some reassuring info in the next section.)