Roos - the pandemic and children

There have been some pretty major changes for a whole cohort or generation of children exposed to the pandemic. Children who are in utero during the pandemic had elevated rates of exposure to really significant psychosocial distress in their parents. And we know that that’s related to things like elevated rates of preterm birth and things like higher levels of exposure to stress hormones like cortisol and some developmental risks.  

And then you sort of move through the developmental ages. So, really young infants had higher rates of parent stress, also higher rates of parents at home. So, there are some opportunities for increased relationship support there, but across the board, really less exposure to other kids. So, kids who are at home with siblings had more social exposure than kids who are home solo. But we are seeing that this whole group of kids who are entering early learning now have a little-some delays on social emotional learning. And those are reflected on tests of cognitive development and also reflected in sort of neurodevelopmental markers in the brain.  

So, some significant effects. But I also think it’s important to highlight that the story’s not all bad, and we don’t want to elevate parent anxiety more than I think the concerns that a lot of parents already have. So, these aren’t uniform risks.  We’re seeing about a 10 to 20% increase in risk for really early markers. These aren’t actual markers of delays or developmental diagnoses. These are like precursors to those diagnoses that suggests that there might be some differences or slower development.  

But kids brains develop all over the place. So I might be a kid who has a little bit slower motor development, so I start out being really chatty early on and my speech really gains a lot of traction. I might be a kid who has slower speech. That means my motor development is really advanced. So, what we look for more in terms of concerns is when kids are delayed across multiple avenues of development and you see delays across the board. I think in this situation, what we’re seeing is that there are some social delays which make sense in the context of the pandemic and which kids are going to have really good catch up on in the context of supportive early learning environments.