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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s not brought up at this point in the pandemic because many of us have had kids in daycare for over a year now with all masked caregivers and our kids are fine. Seriously, I don’t know of any child who is behind because of this. My own 1 year old has barely seen an adult other than me and DH unmasked and he’s ahead on every milestone.

This is not a big deal. Kids are resilient.[/quote]

Same here. Lots of babies have been born during this pandemic. If there was an issue, we'd have seen it by now. Your kid will be just fine, OP. [/quote]

Well there was one study suggesting there might be an issue (not specific to daycare but saying pandemic-born babies have a lower average IQ). I don’t know what to make of that. [/quote]

https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/has-the-pandemic-lowered-baby-iq

[quote] taken at face value, these results are worrisome. However — and I cannot stress this enough — they are completely implausible. There is absolutely no way that there was a reduction in IQ of 82 points as a result of being born during the pandemic. In fact, there is also no way there was a reduction of 27 IQ points. Even 15 seems impossible. IQ is just not malleable in this way. Extremely low birth weight is among the most significant reducers of IQ, and even that is a fraction of the size of these effects.

People sometimes ask me how I evaluate research papers, how I think about what a good study is versus less good. There is some science to it and some art, and it’s hard to point to everything. But one important question to ask is: Could this be right? Given other things we know about the world, is this effect plausible? The answer here is that it is not.

So what is going on in this paper if it is not a pandemic effect? I think there are two possibilities. One is selection of the people in the study. This is an in-person assessment, and the group of caregivers who are willing to bring their children into the lab may be different during the pandemic than before it. Normally I would lean on this explanation. However, the size of the effects are too large for that to explain much of it — even pretty extensive selection is not going to get you to 30 IQ points.

What I think is a more likely explanation is masks. The tests during the pandemic were done with the testing staff wearing masks. I’m not anti-masking! But it seems extremely plausible that infants and toddlers in a lab setting would have more trouble following verbal instructions and facial cues from a masked interviewer than an unmasked one. This is probably especially true since these babies would have mostly interacted with unmasked adults (i.e. their parents), so the masking may have been even more of a factor than it would be for an older child who was more used to it.

The authors mention this in the conclusion but do not make much of it. It might have been helpful to see a more detailed breakdown of the results by measures that could or could not have been impacted by masking. For example, some of the measures are things like whether the child can sit or roll over, which are likely less affected.

Maybe it’s not masks! I don’t know. That strikes me as the most obvious explanation, but without getting into the data, I cannot tell precisely. What I can tell you, based on what we know about IQ, is that the pandemic did not lower baby IQ by 82 points. It just didn’t. [/quote][/quote]

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