The COVID generation: how is the pandemic affecting kids' brains? - Nature.com

Dumitriu and her team at the NewYork–Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in New York City had more than two years of data on infant development — since late 2017, they had been analysing the communication and motor skills of babies up to six months old.

Dumitriu thought it would be interesting to compare the results from babies born before and during the pandemic.

The infants born during the pandemic scored lower, on average, on tests of gross motor, fine motor and communication skills compared with those born before it (both groups were assessed by their parents using an established questionnaire)1.

Although children have generally fared well when infected with SARS-CoV-2, preliminary research suggests that pandemic-related stress during pregnancy could be negatively affecting fetal brain development in some children.

Moreover, frazzled parents and carers might be interacting differently or less with their young children in ways that could affect a child’s physical and mental abilities.

Lockdowns — which have been crucial for controlling the spread of the coronavirus — have isolated many young families, robbing them of playtime and social interactions.

“Everyone wants to document how this is impacting child development, and parent–child relationships and peer relationships,” says James Griffin, chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland.

Some babies born during the past two years might be experiencing developmental delays, whereas others might have thrived, if carers were at home for extended periods and there were more opportunities for siblings to interact.

Some researchers propose that many of the children falling behind in development will be able to catch up without lasting effects.

“I do not expect that we’re going to find that there’s a generation that has been injured by this pandemic,” says Moriah Thomason, a child and adolescent psychologist at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine.

Although the pandemic changed how they conducted their research — fewer visitors and more cleaning — they continued inviting babies to their lab, to track motor, visual and language skills as part of a seven-year National Institutes of Health study on early childhood development and its effects on later health.

When they compared results across participants, the pandemic-born babies scored almost two standard deviations lower than those born before it on a suite of tests that measure development in a similar way to IQ tests.

At first, Deoni assumed that selection bias was at play: perhaps the families who made the effort to come in for testing during the pandemic were those whose children were at risk of developmental problems or were already showing them?

That situation is different from a pandemic, but suggests that babies could make up for hardship once restrictions are lifted.

Kids and COVID: why young immune systems are still on top.

Worryingly, however, Deoni has found that the longer the pandemic has continued, the more deficits children have accumulated.

But, assuming the findings do have merit, why might babies born during the COVID-19 pandemic be experiencing significant cognitive — and especially motor — deficits.

He also suspects that babies and toddlers are not getting as much gross motor practice as usual because they aren’t regularly playing with other children or going to playgrounds.

In a study published earlier this year, researchers in the United Kingdom surveyed 189 parents of children between the ages of 8 months and 3 years, asking whether their children received daycare or attended preschool during the pandemic, and assessing language and executive functioning skills.

The authors found that the children’s skills were stronger if they had received group care during the pandemic, and that these benefits were more pronounced among children from lower-income backgrounds4.

For instance, a growing body of research suggests that among school-aged children, remote learning might be widening the already-large learning and development gaps between children from affluent and low-income backgrounds and between white kids and children of colour.

In parts of sub-Saharan Africa — including Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania and Uganda — research suggests that some children have lost as much as a full year of learning6.

One important question is whether masks, which obscure parts of the face important for expressing emotions and speech, might also be affecting kids’ emotional and language development.

Other researchers are keen to know whether the pandemic could be affecting children’s development before they are born.

Catherine Lebel, a psychologist who runs the Developmental Neuroimaging Lab at the University of Calgary in Canada, and her colleagues surveyed more than 8,000 pregnant people during the pandemic.

How was this stress affecting babies in the womb.

In a preprint posted in October, they found that babies born to people who reported more prenatal distress — more anxiety or depression symptoms — showed different structural connections between their amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, and their prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for executive functioning skills11.

Other research has found similar associations between prenatal pandemic stress and child development.

Livio Provenzi, a psychologist at the IRCCS Mondino Foundation in Pavia, Italy, and his colleagues observed that three-month-old babies of people who reported experiencing more stress and anxiety during pregnancy had more problems regulating their emotions and attention — they were less able to maintain their attention on social stimuli, for instance, and were less easily soothed — than were babies of people who were less stressed and anxious during pregnancy14.

She notes that, although there is a lot of concern about how prenatal stress might affect pandemic babies, early findings such as these do not mean that children are going to struggle for the rest of their lives.

Indeed, research on historical disasters suggests that, although stress in the womb can be harmful to babies, it doesn’t always have lasting effects.

Children born to people who experienced considerable stress as a result of the 2011 floods in Queensland, Australia, showed deficits in problem-solving and social skills at six months of age, compared with children born to people who experienced less stress15.

The research on pandemic babies presents a mixed picture, and scientists say it’s too early to draw meaningful interpretations.

The US National Institute on Drug Abuse is funding a handful of studies through its Healthy Brain and Child Development Study.

These will look at how maternal stress and substance use during the pandemic affect child development.

In March 2020, Thomason launched the international COVID Generation Research Alliance, which brings together researchers from 14 countries studying families with young children during the pandemic.

Parents can make headway by playing and talking with their young children regularly, and giving them opportunities to play with others in safe settings.

Provenzi’s research14 has found that people who had just given birth and were visited at home by nurses and neonatologists experienced less stress and anxiety than those who did not receive these visits.

“But at the same time, we also recognize the importance of the first 1,000 days of a child’s life as being the crucial early foundations.” The first pandemic babies, born in March 2020 are, at this point, more than 650 days old.

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