Pandemic babies perform worse than others in developmental test
Children born during the Corona pandemic may learn more slowly than others. This is indicated by a developmental test for social and motor skills with around 250 babies.
In the first year of the Corona pandemic 2020, millions of children have been born worldwide. One essential question: How do the special circumstances affect their development? Researchers from the U.S. have investigated this question and found in a developmental test that pandemic babies at the age of six months performed worse than those born shortly before the pandemic, as the team published in the journal "JAMA Pediatrics".
255 babies were part of the study. They were born between March and December 2020 at Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital and Allen Hospital at NewYork-Presbyterian. The team collected data using questionnaires that pediatricians give to parents to assess aspects of child development such as communication, fine and gross motor skills, problem solving and social skills.
The result: pandemic children scored slightly lower in areas such as motor skills and social skills, but not in communication or problem-solving skills. "The results suggest that the tremendous stress to which pregnant mothers were exposed during this unprecedented period may have played a role," pediatrician Dani Dumitriu, an author of the study, classified the findings in a press release accompanying the study.
Another possible reason, besides stressed caregivers, is that the children were less likely to meet others to play. Those who did meet, in turn, were not allowed to interact as babies did before the pandemic.
Nearly half of the mothers in the study had covid infection during the course of their pregnancy, according to the researchers. Most became ill without symptoms or only mildly. Strikingly, there were no differences in outcomes between the babies of intervening sick and healthy mothers.
In general, the researchers found only minor differences in the offspring. They were small shifts in mean scores between groups, Dumitriu says: "However, these small shifts deserve special attention because they can have significant public health implications at the population level." This is known from other pandemics and natural disasters, he says.
"The results of our small study don't necessarily mean that this generation will be impaired later in life," Dumitriu says. "We're still at a very early stage of development, where there's still a lot of opportunity to intervene and get these babies on the right developmental path." She and her colleagues plan to continue monitoring the babies in long-term studies.
Spectrum of Science
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