Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by persedes » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

smeej wrote: post #46

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 th…

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.

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

#172

Post by gwern » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

weeksie wrote: post #158

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

> 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'.

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

#173

Post by cnendbxhx » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

sharikous wrote: post #32

erhk wrote: post #7

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

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 ince…

Politician incentives to win elections are not the same as whats best for the country.

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

#174

Post by WA » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

rock_hard wrote: post #160

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…

We also have a unlimited screen time policy with our kids It’s been nothing but great! They turned into information sponges with a huge amount of knowledge about the world, way ahead of their peers. Our son watches a lot of extrem sports YouTube content which always inspires him to push harder to get better at those sports himself. He is the only one in his class who will tackle the large half pipes at the local dirt…

Cool, but what if your son stops watching interesting YT videos and starts playing Fortnite 10 hours a day?

And: How old is your son and at what age did you start the unlimited screen time policy?

Because as you say, there is more nuance to screen time. It depends on the kid’s personality, the age, the environment, friends, access to outdoor activities etc.

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

#175

Post by inkblotuniverse » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

zelienople wrote: post #111

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 eff…

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.

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

#176

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

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…

> bankrupt in both their pedagogy and their budgets

The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets.

The main budgetary problem is bureaucratic. The schools get more than enough money, but the teachers aren't the ones who decide how to spend it, so a teacher who wants more school supplies than are allocated has to pay out of pocket and then we get these anecdotes.

The solution is a combination of two things. First, stop trying to regulate education from the top. Let the individual teachers do it. Provide resources, don't enforce conformity. Second, let the parents choose the teachers, or more realistically, the school. Then you get competition between schools to provide the best education instead of the existing system of like it or lump it. Also, give the same money to the parents who are homeschooling. Homeschool is school and the families doing it shouldn't be financially penalized for choosing something that by most accounts gives better results.

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

#177

Post by WA » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 7:01 PM UTC

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…

Or maybe you suffer from survivorship bias. I mean, anecdotes are nice and all, but totally useless in determining whether unlimited screen time has negative effects or not.

And my educated guess is: it depends.

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

#178

Post by croes » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #165

baxtr wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

Just fine this is the assessment of the previous poster, not that of his friend's parents.

You can't devalue that just because abusive parents use similar words. And I doubt that abusive parents have a unique wording so you can't infer abuse from certain phrases.

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

#179

Post by zitterbewegung » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 7:04 PM UTC

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…

This post is so typical of all scientific posts to HN.

Person posts negatively to the research and they never look at p valued or sample sizes. Also, they disregard any other possible research .

Then a few to a hundred posts refuting the parent with anecdotal evidence of both positive and negative outcomes especially when science doesn’t work in anecdotal evidence which is the point of science and it basically shows that they didn’t read the story either.

The big problem is that science isn’t one sided. That papers are cherry picked from preprints or even Confrence and journals where one out of ten papers in a Confrence or a journal publication refute the article regardless.

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

#180

Post by Jarwain » Sun, Dec 19, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #87

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.

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