23 ms·

Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

269 points by kevin_hu 5y ago

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
... Because parents already suffering with anxiety from living through these years, need additional anxiety about the 'performance' of their children in the years coming. Enjoy life and be gentle with each other, that's the performance that matters.
- j0ba 5y ago
  Would you prefer society just ignores this inconvenient fact? 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.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    The inconvenient fact incontrovertibly established by a non-peer reviewed paper that most of HN probably just read the abstract of anyways? 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.
    - jokethrowaway 5y ago
      Anecdotal, but I have a 5 and a 3 years old and missed nursery has been terrible for their development. 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)
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        > You don't even need a study for this, it's just common sense Lots of common sense things turn out to be false, and the plural of anecdote is not data. We absolutely need studies.
rgrieselhuber 5y ago
How the toddlers of today growing up with fully masked teachers during their institutionalized education will manage to develop normal social skills without being able to see people’s faces is beyond me.
- notpachet 5y ago
  Hopefully by the time it becomes a problem, we can all just hide behind our avatars inside the Metaverse. /s
  - zbendefy 5y ago
    Where is this sudden surge of talking about the metaverse coming from?
  - luckman212 5y ago
    Yeah that's cool, taking one step further: the Metaverse might finally give us ugly people a chance for a fair and happy life.
- dessant 5y ago
  They will manage just fine, because they are exposed to enough maskless people at home and in other social settings. And even in schools, kids often don't follow mask mandates, especially when the teacher steps out, or sets an example by wearing a chin diaper during class.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    > They will manage just fine because they are exposed to enough maskless people at home and in other social settings 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.
deleted 5y ago
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erhk 5y ago
Another outsize impact of overreaching quarantine restrictions. Why do we let politicians rather than epidemologists make these decisions?
- lambdaba 5y ago
  The politicians follow the epidemiologists and the modelers etc. On the contrary, we have a case of a lack of politicians courageous enough to say no and lead / convince the people that it is the right thing to do.
  - showerrain 5y ago
    And for the politicians that are courageous enough, we use this widespread hysteria to remove them from office.
- krona 5y ago
  > Why do we let politicians rather than epidemiologists make these decisions? 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.)
- sharikous 5y ago
  Precisely because of things like this. 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.
throwaway_2009 5y ago
People who support lockdowns aren't interested in facts; their viewpoints are shaped by marketing. It's been blindingly obvious from the moment we knew that coronavirus had a 1% IFR pre-vaccine that all of the restrictions have been net negative. We're now over 2% of our lives into this _by any definition_, which makes it utterly incontrovertible. That's why we have constant "reminders" everywhere; it's an attempt to bypass logic by simply bombarding people with nonsense.
- twofornone 5y ago
  Not to mention that the IFR is dramatically skewed by age and obesity. Yes, early indications were that COVID was a serious, deadly pandemic, but we've had more than enough time and data at this point to recognize that this is not the plague that it is being treated as.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Those of us who are immune compromised or obese are people too. I don't expect the whole world to stop for me, though would appreciate if folks take some precautions until hospitals can manage the flood. (In the US over 40% of adults are obese.)
    - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
      If the vaccine-hesitant are to be shunned and have specific restrictions levied against them for the sake of not overflowing hospitals, then so should the obese and old, IMO.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  > People who support lockdowns aren't interested in facts; their viewpoints are shaped by marketing. Sweeping generalizations aren't really adding to the discussion here. Please assume the best of others. We're all trying to find the best way forward with incomplete information. And tying ideas too closely to ones identity, or that of others, won't help us adapt as more evidence come to light.
colordrops 5y ago
At this point in the pandemic we've should have come up with models that factor in the externalities of lockdown and factor that into policy decisions. That somehow still hasn't happened. People say "things are pretty much back to normal" but parents with kids in school know this is not true.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pgwhalen 5y ago
  I agree that externalities are important to consider, but what would such a model look like? It seems that studies like this are a necessary precursor if we are to truly estimate these external costs (so kudos to those involved).
- ravenstine 5y ago
  - enkid 5y ago
    So you're just going to make vague allusions to some great evil being done while providing no data? Have you thought about why you get flagged when you discuss this topic?
    - ravenstine 5y ago
      Is it so much to ask for others to connect the dots? What else am I do to when providing authoritative or academic information puts my account at risk? And yes, there are many commingling factors for why I get flagged, none of which I consider valid. I can provide links to information straight from the horse's mouth, have done so in the past, and it never matters. The vast majority of people have a knee-jerk aversion to anything that suggests that they're staring at a mirage, or that they're victims of psychological warfare. > So you're just going to make vague allusions to some great evil It depends on what you consider evil. In this context, I've yet to use such a term. Already, it sounds like you're imagining I suggested some grand conspiracy.
fouc 5y ago
> NOTE: This preprint [..] has not been certified by peer review Says it all. Take it with a huge grain of salt.
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  Posting non-peer reviewed scientific papers is an anti-pattern.
throwaway2331 5y ago
Statistically significant != practically significant. It's almost impossible to deduce, due to this paper's horrid formatting.
fabbari 5y ago
Would love to see the raw data, but from their own plots you can see that 2017, 2018 and 2019 show a trend that would make the 2020 and 2021 data consistent with the trend. 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.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I wonder what could be driving that trend.
  - whalesalad 5y ago
    The collapse of rational thinking abilities.
    - gizmo385 5y ago
      As evidenced by?
      - kurthr 5y ago
        The rise and fall of rationality based words in English language (rose until 1980s and has plummeted since): https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118
        IsThisYou 5y ago
        Thanks for the link, that's really interesting.
        Nasrudith 5y ago
        That seems methodologically quite questionable for the conclusions drawn. Like many blind semantic analysis attempts which consider language of a crash report for bug testing toxic due to the instances of "does not work", and "kill" and "fail". Meanwhile "I hope you enjoy eating your family then." is positive. 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.
amanaplanacanal 5y ago
They didn’t test these children for antibodies. They just assume that infection is not the cause of the differences they see. And all the commenters seem to be blaming lockdowns.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I haven't seen any evidence for covid causing neurodegenerative problems, so it sounds logical to point at the change in environment. Even "Long Covid" sounds a lot like undiagnosed depression or chronic fatigue syndrome.
  - canjobear 5y ago
    There’s more to it than depression/chronic fatigue. See for example https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/on-the-heels-of-covid-19-influx-of-patients-with-pots-symptoms https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/on-the-heels-o...
  - Siira 5y ago
    Isn’t a major cause of CFS some initial disease in the first place?
paulryanrogers 5y ago
Seems early to be drawing conclusions here. Still good that they're gathering data. Can anyone speak to the robustness of these Mullen Scales? Especially in the 0-2 age group?
questiondev 5y ago
i know some people said that covid-19 infection can cause brain fog in adults months after they recovered. there were also people saying that the vaccines may cause this as well. not saying i know exactly the reason for this, just pointing out arguments/news articles i read. 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 https://www.pnas.org/content/93/24/13508 https://www.pnas.org/content/93/24/13508
- Insanity 5y ago
  Had not heard this about vaccines but definitely regarding COVID infections. Also a “long tail” before full recovery (anecdata only).
hkt 5y ago
In the UK we closed schools, universities and workplaces during lockdowns while keeping heathrow airport open - the busiest in the country. Business travel was allowed, but nurseries were closed. 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.
29athrowaway 5y ago
Can be explained because the economy is weaker.
jpdus 5y ago
I don't have time to look into methodology in great detail, but their model seems to be flawed? 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... [1] https://core.ac.uk/reader/16394968?utm_source=linkout https://core.ac.uk/reader/16394968?utm_source=linkout
- sieabahlpark 5y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if this is a pay-for-study type result. Veritasium did an exposé that 90% of published papers are just plain wrong.
smeej 5y ago
I wish the "Methods" section got a bit more info the assessments themselves. 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.
- zeckalpha 5y ago
  They are younger than that, this was from August
- persedes 5y ago
  I would be interested too if those tests were performed with facemasks for the investigators or maybe fully remote. They mostly seem to focus on the modelling and not how they gathered the data pre/during pandemic.
- mcguire 5y ago
  "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." https://www.pearsonassessments.com/store/usassessments/en/Store/Professional-Assessments/Developmental-Early-Childhood/Mullen-Scales-of-Early-Learning/p/100000306.html 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-scales-of-early-learning https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/mullen-scale...)
zeckalpha 5y ago
> One aspect also not investigated here is the impact of mask-wearing by the study staff during child visits and assessments [53]. The inability of infants to see full facial expressions may have eliminated non-verbal cues, muffled instructions, or otherwise altered the understanding of the test questions and instructions. They changed their methods in 2020, so they can’t attribute this to their methods or other indirect effects of the pandemic.
cossatot 5y ago
The effects of the 1918 influenza epidemic were large and persisted for decades, as well. Marginal Revolution has a good summary[1]. Fetal exposure seems to have been a major factor[2], money quote here: Fetal health is found to affect nearly every socioeconomic outcome recorded in the 1960, 1970, and 1980 Censuses. Men and women show large and discontinuous reductions in educational attainment if they had been in utero during the pandemic. The children of infected mothers were up to 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school. Wages of men were 5–9 percent lower because of infection. Socioeconomic status…was substantially reduced, and the likelihood of being poor rose as much as 15 percent compared with other cohorts. Public entitlement spending was also increased. 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/the-lasting-effects-of-the-1918-influenza-pandemic.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/th... [2]: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/507154 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10....
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  But infants aren't really susceptible to covid (not sure if they get it less frequently or not, but they very rarely develop strong symptoms). This is in contrast to flu which strongly affects children, so I'm not sure that exposure in utero would have as strong an effect as in 1918. But maybe sick mothers are have an impact on the fetus.
  - Jarwain 5y ago
    I think sick mothers play a part. I wonder if another part might just be resource allocation to immune response? Resources spent fighting disease aren't spent on development? Idk though this is pure uninformed speculation
- rightbyte 5y ago
visarga 5y ago
The pandemic was a big hit on the development of kids who were supposed to start kindergarten but stayed at home instead. They are on average less social and verbal as a result. I hope they can recover the delay as I am the father of a 3 year old. 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.
- smt88 5y ago
  > 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.
  - visarga 5y ago
    The age, not attending classes, is about having the first romantic experiences. And there were months of lock downs and almost two years of remote schooling cutting the opportunities to meet people.
    - smt88 5y ago
      They still did those things. School isn't the only place kids socialize.
      - lazyasciiart 5y ago
        Movie theaters, shops, sports leagues, boy scouts, etc were also closed.
- yed 5y ago
  The study in this post finds that to be not true (emphasis mine): > 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.
zzzeek 5y ago
you know what really impacts early cognitive performance? having one's parents die from covid. So while social distancing, closings, and masks completely suck, they have been necessary in order to attempt to maintain public health, and without them, there would have been vastly more deaths.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  That may be true for grandparents. We should do something about heart diseases or car accidents which are far more worrisome for parents.
  - zzzeek 5y ago
    we did, we mandate seatbelts in cars, stringent safety guidelines for cars, trans fats in food were banned, and such. The actors who would otherwise be irresponsible, car drivers, car manufacturers, food providers, and in this case, people who spread disease by not being vaxxed or masked, are coerced into acting responsibly by government.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Parents of infants have high rates of heart diseases? I found following estimate about covid: > 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.
- dude187 5y ago
  None of that works. Covid is here to stay. You're just saying that these kids should hide their face and stay away from their friends for their whole life
  - zzzeek 5y ago
    didnt actually say anything like that, and I also chose my words pretty carefully. might want to read more closely before responding.
excalibur 5y ago
> Since the first reports of novel coronavirus in the 2020, public health organizations have advocated preventative policies to limit virus, including stay-at-home orders that closed businesses, daycares, schools, playgrounds, and limited child learning and typical activities. Did nobody proofread this before it was published?
zelienople 5y ago
We often exclude obvious apects of natural selection in these studies. In this case, the decision to have children during a pandemic may be indicative of a predisposition to poor mental functioning in the parents, which would naturally result in poorer cognitive function, on average, in the offspring. 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.
- inkblotuniverse 5y ago
  I predict a midwit curve. The low-intelligence/low-conscientious people will just have kids as usual; those of middling intelligence will think as you; and those of the highest intelligence will keep having kids as much as they did before.
chrischattin 5y ago
The second and third order effects from society's misguided Covid response will, over time, prove much much worse than the effects of the actual virus.
- watwut 5y ago
  I like how HN switched from "kids are better off with stay at home parent" to "infants need to be in childcare". Cause these are year and half or so old at max.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
voidfunc 5y ago
Oh good we are breeding a generation of even stupider people
weeksie 5y ago
They claim the pandemic has dropped kids IQ scores by a full standard deviation? N=40? Hmmm. Nothing about that paper inspires confidence.
- gwern 5y ago
  > Leveraging a large on-going longitudinal study of child neurodevelopment, we examined general childhood cognitive scores in 2020 and 2021 vs. the preceding decade, 2011-2019. We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic. Moreover, we find that males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected. 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'.
  - heartbeats 5y ago
    That's true in the United States, but not in other countries: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/36/e2105709118 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?)
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
zoomablemind 5y ago
> ...Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance 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'.
- brnaftr184 5y ago
  You're assuming linearity, which is almost certainly not the case over the span of a human lifetime. Catching up is going to require a lot of investment from a lot of different people over a long period of time, and in many cases will probably fail, and from what the evidence in this particular study shows is that the high impact group so happens to be (predictably) those of lower SES - read that as the poor get poorer.
- zoomablemind 5y ago
  Citing from the article: "...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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1550495/
huijzer 5y ago
I always wonder, if the effect is so clear as they present in the title, why do they need such a complex model to show it? I call a stepwise regression complex because it requires thinking about what effect the steps have on the outcome in regards to overfitting
fumeux_fume 5y ago
Perhaps, but the children of all the people replying to this thread seem to be excelling.
peterbonney 5y ago
I think I say this every time I see a headline like this on HN, but I'll say it again: The past decade of social science research publication has proven that provocative-sounding results should be considered fraudulent until the underlying data has been published, and then (assuming the data passes muster) should be regarded with skepticism until independently replicated with a fresh data set.
- uniqueuid 5y ago
  Sad but true, and extends to economics, psychology, lots of neurological and medical research as well. Everyone needs pre-registration, and everyone needs open data.
- q1w2 5y ago
  One of the most eye-opening studies I saw was that social science papers with the most citations, had the highest likelihood of not being reproducible. Meaning that Social Sciences are actually pushing out misinformation more than not.
  - hannob 5y ago
    This isn't an issue of social science. This is an issue that has been found in a diverse number of fields, basically everywhere where someone has looked: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.0003...
    - gmadsen 5y ago
      its a little disingenuous to make it seem like all fields are equal. when that is clearly not the case
  - hulahoof 5y ago
    Is this somehow a flow on effect of more commonly cited papers having more reproduction attempts?
jacquesm 5y ago
I wonder how this relates to children born in war zones. One of my parents was born smack in the middle of world war II, the other went through it as a young teenager. Nobody seemed to care one bit about their cognitive performance, reduced or otherwise, as long as they managed to survive first.
User23 5y ago
I wonder how much of this is due to the greatly increased alcohol consumption during the pandemic.
mcguire 5y ago
From the paper: "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-scales-of-early-learning 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.
Animats 5y ago
For the commentators who didn't read the article, this is about kids in the first year or two of life. "Screen time" is not an issue.
XorNot 5y ago
How the heck could they possibly have established this with a cadre of at most 2 year olds?
thesz 5y ago
Mother's exercise during pregnancy enhance baby's brain development: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029433-000-exercise-in-pregnancy-boosts-baby-brain-development/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029433-000-exercise... 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.
8note 5y ago
There what, 1 or 2 by now? I'm not convinced that any measures of cognitive performance are going to be useful that early
vbphprubyjsgo 5y ago
why would you upvote this? are you retarded?

269 points by kevin_hu 5y ago

... Because parents already suffering with anxiety from living through these years, need additional anxiety about the 'performance' of their children in the years coming. Enjoy life and be gentle with each other, that's the performance that matters.

j0ba 5y ago
Would you prefer society just ignores this inconvenient fact? 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.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  The inconvenient fact incontrovertibly established by a non-peer reviewed paper that most of HN probably just read the abstract of anyways? 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.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    Anecdotal, but I have a 5 and a 3 years old and missed nursery has been terrible for their development. 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)
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      > You don't even need a study for this, it's just common sense Lots of common sense things turn out to be false, and the plural of anecdote is not data. We absolutely need studies.

rgrieselhuber 5y ago

How the toddlers of today growing up with fully masked teachers during their institutionalized education will manage to develop normal social skills without being able to see people’s faces is beyond me.

notpachet 5y ago
Hopefully by the time it becomes a problem, we can all just hide behind our avatars inside the Metaverse. /s
- zbendefy 5y ago
  Where is this sudden surge of talking about the metaverse coming from?
- luckman212 5y ago
  Yeah that's cool, taking one step further: the Metaverse might finally give us ugly people a chance for a fair and happy life.
dessant 5y ago
They will manage just fine, because they are exposed to enough maskless people at home and in other social settings. And even in schools, kids often don't follow mask mandates, especially when the teacher steps out, or sets an example by wearing a chin diaper during class.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  > They will manage just fine because they are exposed to enough maskless people at home and in other social settings 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

erhk 5y ago

Another outsize impact of overreaching quarantine restrictions. Why do we let politicians rather than epidemologists make these decisions?

lambdaba 5y ago
The politicians follow the epidemiologists and the modelers etc. On the contrary, we have a case of a lack of politicians courageous enough to say no and lead / convince the people that it is the right thing to do.
- showerrain 5y ago
  And for the politicians that are courageous enough, we use this widespread hysteria to remove them from office.
krona 5y ago
> Why do we let politicians rather than epidemiologists make these decisions? 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.)
sharikous 5y ago
Precisely because of things like this. 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.

throwaway_2009 5y ago

People who support lockdowns aren't interested in facts; their viewpoints are shaped by marketing. It's been blindingly obvious from the moment we knew that coronavirus had a 1% IFR pre-vaccine that all of the restrictions have been net negative. We're now over 2% of our lives into this _by any definition_, which makes it utterly incontrovertible. That's why we have constant "reminders" everywhere; it's an attempt to bypass logic by simply bombarding people with nonsense.

twofornone 5y ago
Not to mention that the IFR is dramatically skewed by age and obesity. Yes, early indications were that COVID was a serious, deadly pandemic, but we've had more than enough time and data at this point to recognize that this is not the plague that it is being treated as.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Those of us who are immune compromised or obese are people too. I don't expect the whole world to stop for me, though would appreciate if folks take some precautions until hospitals can manage the flood. (In the US over 40% of adults are obese.)
  - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
    If the vaccine-hesitant are to be shunned and have specific restrictions levied against them for the sake of not overflowing hospitals, then so should the obese and old, IMO.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
paulryanrogers 5y ago
> People who support lockdowns aren't interested in facts; their viewpoints are shaped by marketing. Sweeping generalizations aren't really adding to the discussion here. Please assume the best of others. We're all trying to find the best way forward with incomplete information. And tying ideas too closely to ones identity, or that of others, won't help us adapt as more evidence come to light.

colordrops 5y ago

At this point in the pandemic we've should have come up with models that factor in the externalities of lockdown and factor that into policy decisions. That somehow still hasn't happened. People say "things are pretty much back to normal" but parents with kids in school know this is not true.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pgwhalen 5y ago
I agree that externalities are important to consider, but what would such a model look like? It seems that studies like this are a necessary precursor if we are to truly estimate these external costs (so kudos to those involved).
ravenstine 5y ago
- enkid 5y ago
  So you're just going to make vague allusions to some great evil being done while providing no data? Have you thought about why you get flagged when you discuss this topic?
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    Is it so much to ask for others to connect the dots? What else am I do to when providing authoritative or academic information puts my account at risk? And yes, there are many commingling factors for why I get flagged, none of which I consider valid. I can provide links to information straight from the horse's mouth, have done so in the past, and it never matters. The vast majority of people have a knee-jerk aversion to anything that suggests that they're staring at a mirage, or that they're victims of psychological warfare. > So you're just going to make vague allusions to some great evil It depends on what you consider evil. In this context, I've yet to use such a term. Already, it sounds like you're imagining I suggested some grand conspiracy.

fouc 5y ago

> NOTE: This preprint [..] has not been certified by peer review Says it all. Take it with a huge grain of salt.

shrimp_emoji 5y ago
Posting non-peer reviewed scientific papers is an anti-pattern.

throwaway2331 5y ago

Statistically significant != practically significant. It's almost impossible to deduce, due to this paper's horrid formatting.

fabbari 5y ago

Would love to see the raw data, but from their own plots you can see that 2017, 2018 and 2019 show a trend that would make the 2020 and 2021 data consistent with the trend. 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.

giantg2 5y ago
I wonder what could be driving that trend.
- whalesalad 5y ago
  The collapse of rational thinking abilities.
  - gizmo385 5y ago
    As evidenced by?
    - kurthr 5y ago
      The rise and fall of rationality based words in English language (rose until 1980s and has plummeted since): https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118
      - IsThisYou 5y ago
        Thanks for the link, that's really interesting.
      - Nasrudith 5y ago
        That seems methodologically quite questionable for the conclusions drawn. Like many blind semantic analysis attempts which consider language of a crash report for bug testing toxic due to the instances of "does not work", and "kill" and "fail". Meanwhile "I hope you enjoy eating your family then." is positive. 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.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago

They didn’t test these children for antibodies. They just assume that infection is not the cause of the differences they see. And all the commenters seem to be blaming lockdowns.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
I haven't seen any evidence for covid causing neurodegenerative problems, so it sounds logical to point at the change in environment. Even "Long Covid" sounds a lot like undiagnosed depression or chronic fatigue syndrome.
- canjobear 5y ago
  There’s more to it than depression/chronic fatigue. See for example https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/on-the-heels-of-covid-19-influx-of-patients-with-pots-symptoms https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/on-the-heels-o...
- Siira 5y ago
  Isn’t a major cause of CFS some initial disease in the first place?

paulryanrogers 5y ago

Seems early to be drawing conclusions here. Still good that they're gathering data. Can anyone speak to the robustness of these Mullen Scales? Especially in the 0-2 age group?

questiondev 5y ago

i know some people said that covid-19 infection can cause brain fog in adults months after they recovered. there were also people saying that the vaccines may cause this as well. not saying i know exactly the reason for this, just pointing out arguments/news articles i read. 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 https://www.pnas.org/content/93/24/13508 https://www.pnas.org/content/93/24/13508

Insanity 5y ago
Had not heard this about vaccines but definitely regarding COVID infections. Also a “long tail” before full recovery (anecdata only).

hkt 5y ago

In the UK we closed schools, universities and workplaces during lockdowns while keeping heathrow airport open - the busiest in the country. Business travel was allowed, but nurseries were closed. 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.

29athrowaway 5y ago

Can be explained because the economy is weaker.

jpdus 5y ago

I don't have time to look into methodology in great detail, but their model seems to be flawed? 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... [1] https://core.ac.uk/reader/16394968?utm_source=linkout https://core.ac.uk/reader/16394968?utm_source=linkout

sieabahlpark 5y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if this is a pay-for-study type result. Veritasium did an exposé that 90% of published papers are just plain wrong.

smeej 5y ago

I wish the "Methods" section got a bit more info the assessments themselves. 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.

zeckalpha 5y ago
They are younger than that, this was from August
persedes 5y ago
I would be interested too if those tests were performed with facemasks for the investigators or maybe fully remote. They mostly seem to focus on the modelling and not how they gathered the data pre/during pandemic.
mcguire 5y ago
"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." https://www.pearsonassessments.com/store/usassessments/en/Store/Professional-Assessments/Developmental-Early-Childhood/Mullen-Scales-of-Early-Learning/p/100000306.html 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-scales-of-early-learning https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/mullen-scale...)

zeckalpha 5y ago

> One aspect also not investigated here is the impact of mask-wearing by the study staff during child visits and assessments [53]. The inability of infants to see full facial expressions may have eliminated non-verbal cues, muffled instructions, or otherwise altered the understanding of the test questions and instructions. They changed their methods in 2020, so they can’t attribute this to their methods or other indirect effects of the pandemic.

cossatot 5y ago

The effects of the 1918 influenza epidemic were large and persisted for decades, as well. Marginal Revolution has a good summary[1]. Fetal exposure seems to have been a major factor[2], money quote here: Fetal health is found to affect nearly every socioeconomic outcome recorded in the 1960, 1970, and 1980 Censuses. Men and women show large and discontinuous reductions in educational attainment if they had been in utero during the pandemic. The children of infected mothers were up to 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school. Wages of men were 5–9 percent lower because of infection. Socioeconomic status…was substantially reduced, and the likelihood of being poor rose as much as 15 percent compared with other cohorts. Public entitlement spending was also increased. 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/the-lasting-effects-of-the-1918-influenza-pandemic.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/th... [2]: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/507154 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10....

jeffreyrogers 5y ago
But infants aren't really susceptible to covid (not sure if they get it less frequently or not, but they very rarely develop strong symptoms). This is in contrast to flu which strongly affects children, so I'm not sure that exposure in utero would have as strong an effect as in 1918. But maybe sick mothers are have an impact on the fetus.
- Jarwain 5y ago
  I think sick mothers play a part. I wonder if another part might just be resource allocation to immune response? Resources spent fighting disease aren't spent on development? Idk though this is pure uninformed speculation
rightbyte 5y ago

visarga 5y ago

The pandemic was a big hit on the development of kids who were supposed to start kindergarten but stayed at home instead. They are on average less social and verbal as a result. I hope they can recover the delay as I am the father of a 3 year old. 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.

smt88 5y ago
> 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.
- visarga 5y ago
  The age, not attending classes, is about having the first romantic experiences. And there were months of lock downs and almost two years of remote schooling cutting the opportunities to meet people.
  - smt88 5y ago
    They still did those things. School isn't the only place kids socialize.
    - lazyasciiart 5y ago
      Movie theaters, shops, sports leagues, boy scouts, etc were also closed.
yed 5y ago
The study in this post finds that to be not true (emphasis mine): > 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.

zzzeek 5y ago

you know what really impacts early cognitive performance? having one's parents die from covid. So while social distancing, closings, and masks completely suck, they have been necessary in order to attempt to maintain public health, and without them, there would have been vastly more deaths.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
That may be true for grandparents. We should do something about heart diseases or car accidents which are far more worrisome for parents.
- zzzeek 5y ago
  we did, we mandate seatbelts in cars, stringent safety guidelines for cars, trans fats in food were banned, and such. The actors who would otherwise be irresponsible, car drivers, car manufacturers, food providers, and in this case, people who spread disease by not being vaxxed or masked, are coerced into acting responsibly by government.
- watwut 5y ago
  Parents of infants have high rates of heart diseases? I found following estimate about covid: > 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.
dude187 5y ago
None of that works. Covid is here to stay. You're just saying that these kids should hide their face and stay away from their friends for their whole life
- zzzeek 5y ago
  didnt actually say anything like that, and I also chose my words pretty carefully. might want to read more closely before responding.

excalibur 5y ago

> Since the first reports of novel coronavirus in the 2020, public health organizations have advocated preventative policies to limit virus, including stay-at-home orders that closed businesses, daycares, schools, playgrounds, and limited child learning and typical activities. Did nobody proofread this before it was published?

zelienople 5y ago

We often exclude obvious apects of natural selection in these studies. In this case, the decision to have children during a pandemic may be indicative of a predisposition to poor mental functioning in the parents, which would naturally result in poorer cognitive function, on average, in the offspring. 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.

inkblotuniverse 5y ago
I predict a midwit curve. The low-intelligence/low-conscientious people will just have kids as usual; those of middling intelligence will think as you; and those of the highest intelligence will keep having kids as much as they did before.

chrischattin 5y ago

The second and third order effects from society's misguided Covid response will, over time, prove much much worse than the effects of the actual virus.

watwut 5y ago
I like how HN switched from "kids are better off with stay at home parent" to "infants need to be in childcare". Cause these are year and half or so old at max.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

voidfunc 5y ago

Oh good we are breeding a generation of even stupider people

weeksie 5y ago

They claim the pandemic has dropped kids IQ scores by a full standard deviation? N=40? Hmmm. Nothing about that paper inspires confidence.

gwern 5y ago
> Leveraging a large on-going longitudinal study of child neurodevelopment, we examined general childhood cognitive scores in 2020 and 2021 vs. the preceding decade, 2011-2019. We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic. Moreover, we find that males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected. 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'.
- heartbeats 5y ago
  That's true in the United States, but not in other countries: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/36/e2105709118 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?)
  - dragonwriter 5y ago

zoomablemind 5y ago

> ...Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance 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'.

brnaftr184 5y ago
You're assuming linearity, which is almost certainly not the case over the span of a human lifetime. Catching up is going to require a lot of investment from a lot of different people over a long period of time, and in many cases will probably fail, and from what the evidence in this particular study shows is that the high impact group so happens to be (predictably) those of lower SES - read that as the poor get poorer.
zoomablemind 5y ago
Citing from the article: "...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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1550495/

huijzer 5y ago

I always wonder, if the effect is so clear as they present in the title, why do they need such a complex model to show it? I call a stepwise regression complex because it requires thinking about what effect the steps have on the outcome in regards to overfitting

fumeux_fume 5y ago

Perhaps, but the children of all the people replying to this thread seem to be excelling.

peterbonney 5y ago

I think I say this every time I see a headline like this on HN, but I'll say it again: The past decade of social science research publication has proven that provocative-sounding results should be considered fraudulent until the underlying data has been published, and then (assuming the data passes muster) should be regarded with skepticism until independently replicated with a fresh data set.

uniqueuid 5y ago
Sad but true, and extends to economics, psychology, lots of neurological and medical research as well. Everyone needs pre-registration, and everyone needs open data.
q1w2 5y ago
One of the most eye-opening studies I saw was that social science papers with the most citations, had the highest likelihood of not being reproducible. Meaning that Social Sciences are actually pushing out misinformation more than not.
- hannob 5y ago
  This isn't an issue of social science. This is an issue that has been found in a diverse number of fields, basically everywhere where someone has looked: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.0003...
  - gmadsen 5y ago
    its a little disingenuous to make it seem like all fields are equal. when that is clearly not the case
- hulahoof 5y ago
  Is this somehow a flow on effect of more commonly cited papers having more reproduction attempts?

jacquesm 5y ago

I wonder how this relates to children born in war zones. One of my parents was born smack in the middle of world war II, the other went through it as a young teenager. Nobody seemed to care one bit about their cognitive performance, reduced or otherwise, as long as they managed to survive first.

User23 5y ago

I wonder how much of this is due to the greatly increased alcohol consumption during the pandemic.

mcguire 5y ago

From the paper: "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-scales-of-early-learning 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.

Animats 5y ago

For the commentators who didn't read the article, this is about kids in the first year or two of life. "Screen time" is not an issue.

XorNot 5y ago

How the heck could they possibly have established this with a cadre of at most 2 year olds?

thesz 5y ago

Mother's exercise during pregnancy enhance baby's brain development: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029433-000-exercise-in-pregnancy-boosts-baby-brain-development/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029433-000-exercise... 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.

8note 5y ago

There what, 1 or 2 by now? I'm not convinced that any measures of cognitive performance are going to be useful that early

vbphprubyjsgo 5y ago

why would you upvote this? are you retarded?