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

medrxiv.org

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

#81

Post by ryantgtg »

vldchk wrote: post #67
giantg2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what could be driving that trend.

I would bet on the growth of notepads and smartphone usage by children 0-2 age. There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents. Click on some YTube show and baby won’t bother you for the next hour or two.

Lazy parents? Don’t be hasty.

A coworker of mine had every intention of not having any screentime for their toddler. But lockdown meant two parents working from home + no daycare. The solutions were either one of them quits their job or they buy an iPad. Economy necessity dictated the latter.

With my toddler, we retained zero screentime simply because my wife is freelance and can get away with ~10 hours of actual work per week.

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

#82

Post by dempseye »

bryan0 wrote: post #70
xxpor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half the problem is no one has actually expressed a goal we're working towards. Covid isn't going to go away (at least not for a while), which I think everyone at least implicitly accepts at this point. The people who are going to get vaccinated largely have (especially in a few months with the OSHA rule + booster rollout). So what are we even doing?

> Half the problem is no one has actually expressed a goal we're working towards. Yeah I don’t think the goals have been clear, even if they have been changing over time. I think the clearest goal now should be a 90% vaccination rate to turn Covid into the common cold, and then going back to life as normal, but as long as huge swathes of the population refuse to get vaccinated this goal is unattainable. Edit: I belie…

I live in a country with a vaccination rate over 90% and we still have partial lockdowns.

So I suggest you reassess whether meeting that goal in your location would result in things going back to normal for you.

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

#84

Post by cool_dude85 »

coldcode wrote: post #63
colordrops wrote: post #10

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.

Children born during the pandemic are not yet in school. This research makes little sense, measuring cognitive differences of 2 year olds is highly unlikely to be meaningful.

Oh word? Someone should have told the authors while they were getting their MDs and PhDs. Well glad that you were able to solve it, coldcode.

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

#85

Post by Mezzie »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #3

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.

I was blind until I was 4 and while I have some neurological visual issues, my social skills are fine even though I couldn't see facial expressions at that age. Not saying it didn't have an impact, but it's probably not that serious.

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

#86

Post by saurik »

ryantgtg wrote: post #81
vldchk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet on the growth of notepads and smartphone usage by children 0-2 age. There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents. Click on some YTube show and baby won’t bother you for the next hour or two.

Lazy parents? Don’t be hasty. A coworker of mine had every intention of not having any screentime for their toddler. But lockdown meant two parents working from home + no daycare. The solutions were either one of them quits their job or they buy an iPad. Economy necessity dictated the latter. With my toddler, we retained zero screentime simply because my wife is freelance and can get away with ~10 hours of actual wor…

> But lockdown...

The entire point of this sub-thread was to analyze the trend pre-lockdown. (FWIW, I'm then not wanting to comment on whether this is lazy behavior or not, but just that this defense is out of place.)

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

#87

Post by jeffreyrogers »

cossatot wrote: post #56

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 ut…

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.

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

#88

Post by zzzeek »

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.

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

#89

Post by bryan0 »

dempseye wrote: post #82
bryan0 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Half the problem is no one has actually expressed a goal we're working towards. Yeah I don’t think the goals have been clear, even if they have been changing over time. I think the clearest goal now should be a 90% vaccination rate to turn Covid into the common cold, and then going back to life as normal, but as long as huge swathes of the population refuse to get vaccinated this goal is unattainable. Edit: I belie…

I live in a country with a vaccination rate over 90% and we still have partial lockdowns. So I suggest you reassess whether meeting that goal in your location would result in things going back to normal for you.

Good to know. Which country? Why are they implementing lockdowns?

The other problem is that just hitting the % isn’t good enough. You need to keep up to date if boosters are required. So definitely not easy.

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

#90

Post by kurthr »

gizmo385 wrote: post #58
whalesalad wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The collapse of rational thinking abilities.

As evidenced by?

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

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