In the first year of the 2020 corona pandemic, millions of children were born worldwide. An essential question: How do the special circumstances affect their development? Researchers from the USA investigated this question and found in a development test that pandemic babies at the age of six months did worse than those born shortly before the pandemic, as the team published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
255 babies were part of the study. They were born between March and December 2020 at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and Allen Hospital of the New York-Presbyterian. The team collected the data with the help of questionnaires that the paediatricians give parents to evaluate aspects of child development such as communication, fine and gross motor skills, problem solving and social skills.
The result: pandemic children performed slightly worse in areas such as motor skills and social skills, but not in terms of communication or problem-solving skills. “The results suggest that the enormous stress to which the pregnant mothers were exposed in this unprecedented time may have played a role,” says pediatrician Dani Dumitriu, an author of the study, in a press release accompanying the study .
Another possible reason besides stressed caregivers is that the children met others less often to play. Those who met, on the other hand, were not allowed to interact like babies did before the pandemic.
According to the researchers, almost half of the mothers in the study had a Covid infection during their pregnancy. Most of them got sick with no symptoms or only slightly. It was noticeable that there were no differences in the results between the infants of intermittently ill and healthy mothers.