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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]

#161

Post by astrange »

throwaway_2009 wrote: post #141
astrange wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, attendance dropped in 2020 because nobody wants to get sick. This would be true if there was a flu pandemic as well. (And because of travel bans. But the anti-lockdown people mostly support those because that’s the ironic position.)

This comment does not represent the reality I live in. Nice try.

I’m sorry you live in the UK. That must be very difficult for you.

In other places we weren’t nearly so concerned about shutting down pubs; actually the bad case that often happened in the US was leaving bars open (for tax revenue) but closing schools (because parents and teachers are more neurotic than bar goers).

Still I haven’t met a whole lot of people complaining they weren’t allowed to work. Our stimulus worked quite well there.

I don’t think lockdowns are necessary or reasonable in 2022 but at least, as someone temporarily in the UK, I’ll be able to get out of my local family trying to make me see some ridiculously quaint British thing called a “panto”.

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

#162

Post by donw »

sirspacey wrote: post #129
fabbari wrote: post #16

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…

Edit: was intended as response to a reply to this. Appreciate the caution. We took a different approach. Unlimited screen time. Our daughter’s rate of learning is incredible. She willingly explores IRL play. No battles when we ask her to put down her iPad. Roblox and Minecraft are our shared playtime. I was homeschooled with no TV. My experience of her development is similar to what I experienced with my siblings. A…

Most parents treat tablets like fancy TV sets.

The resulting harm can not be understated.

Minecraft and Roblox are active, creative pursuits, and demand disciplined, logical thinking to achieve goals. Lincoln Logs and Erector Sets for the digital age.

TV demands precisely the opposite. Kids are psychologically rewarded for passive non-thinking. They feel the win when their screen hero beats the villain, even though all they did was just... sit there and consume.

The modern equivalents -- TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, basically any streaming video service -- crank that badness up to about 162, because at least the television programming of yore was finite. You could only watch cartoons and be bombarded with ads for maybe two hours at a time before something more boring and adult came on.

Moreover, parents also knew what their kids were watching, because the TV was in the living room. Nowadays, with personal digital devices, none of that holds.

My family treats smartphones the same way we treat guns: both are powerful and dangerous tools.

I could make a pretty strong case that an iPhone is more dangerous to a toddler than an AR-15.

At the same time, you can't hide your kids from the world and expect them to be able to deal with it. Parents must take responsibility and educate relentlessly. You might start with "don't touch, find an adult", but you're going to finish by teaching your kids to master their tools.

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

#163

Post by Siira »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #121
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #18

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.

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.

Isn’t a major cause of CFS some initial disease in the first place?

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

#164

Post by rock_hard »

Ma8ee wrote: post #156
hubb wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no chance this guy has kids. ppl said this same thing about television. if you read newspaper clippings from the early 20th century you can find letters to the editor about parents concerned their kids read too many books

And I think it is a valid concern even today. It’s not that there’s anything inherently bad or dangerous with books, videos or computer games. But too much of anything steal time that is needed for other parts of a well rounded upbringing. If you spend too much time in front of a screen or books, you won’t spend enough time being outdoors and being physically active, or being with friends practicing social skills and…

Some people have excessive behaviors…got nothing to do with TV, Games, Sugar, etc

They just need help to learn to manage those excessive behaviors

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

#165

Post by fragmede »

baxtr wrote: post #148
sirspacey wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: was intended as response to a reply to this. Appreciate the caution. We took a different approach. Unlimited screen time. Our daughter’s rate of learning is incredible. She willingly explores IRL play. No battles when we ask her to put down her iPad. Roblox and Minecraft are our shared playtime. I was homeschooled with no TV. My experience of her development is similar to what I experienced with my siblings. A…

I have a friend who was always the best in his class at Uni and has become a lead doctor in a major hospital. He once told me that he used to watch roughly 2-3 hrs of television on any day when he was a kid because his parents needed to work all the time. He turned out just fine. I remember back in the day television was the bad guy in town. I wonder if iPads aren’t much better since they foster interaction and not j…

Please define what you mean by "just fine". "Just fine" is what parents who abused their kids say. Those kids later go to therapy to understand their treatment was abusive and to deal with it, and they don't turn out just fine, they turn out traumatized. I really have no idea what the situation is, but "they turned out just fine" is to abused kids the same as saying the phrase "calm down" in a heightened situation doesn't do shit to calm the situation down.

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

#166

Post by dools »

nitrogen wrote: post #131
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…

their goal is simply to not be told what to do The urge to resist force is a vital element of US culture as a check on runaway governments. You see it in many movements, on both sides for or against. Women don't want to be forced to carry a baby. LGBT community doesn't want to be forced to hide. Christians don't want to be forced to stop praying in school. Non-Christians don't want to be forced to listen to prayers i…

The comparison of abortion with vaccination is a horrendous piece of libertarian propaganda.

No one is strapping people down and injecting them with a vaccine, it’s not a forced medical procedure. However the involvement in certain activities by the unvaccinated is limited and this is similar to many other public health orders such as not being able to smoke inside a restaurant.

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

#167

Post by zoomablemind »

> ...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'.

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

#168

Post by clavicat »

conception wrote: post #77
gizmo385 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As evidenced by?

The large scale antivax movement for one.

Antivax is literally as old as vaccines are. There’s an enormous Victorian corpus of antivax literature, complete with crazy claims that vaccines were causing leprosy. In this respect, nothing has changed.

Nor does it evince the collapse of rational thinking. If people just suspended their critical judgement and did whatever they were told unquestioningly, there would also be no antivax movement, but their compliance would not speak to their capacity for rationality, only their bovinity.

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

#169

Post by huijzer »

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

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

#170

Post by astrange »

option wrote: post #136
astrange wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Masks outside are good actually. It’s cold outside and they’re warm. You can’t wear a scarf while running.

good try. But Santa Clara county isn’t exactly a cold place, and they do it when it is +30C. I know parents whose kid actually fainted during PE outside.

I mean it’s surprisingly cold right now. Isn’t calling anything under 55F freezing part of the California lifestyle?

But yes in summer the only real upside is getting to dress like a bank robber.

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