However the study is not yet peer-reviewed.
I refuse to waste my time reading this, because I think testing the IQ of a toddler is close to obscene! Epigenetics may lead many kids to suffer from anxiety thanks to this covid-19 drama and that may affect the likelihood of a person using reason/logic, but I’d bet there are coping strategies and that biology itself (hardware) isn’t really affected.
exactly my thoughts
Key excerpt:
In the decade preceding the pandemic, the mean IQ score on standardised tests for children aged between three months and three years of age hovered around 100, but for children born during the pandemic that number tumbled to 78, according to the analysis, which is yet to be peer-reviewed.
Hypothesis:
The first few years of a child’s life are critical to their cognitive development. But with Covid-19 triggering the closure of businesses, nurseries, schools and playgrounds, life for infants changed considerably, with parents stressed and stretched as they tried to balance work and childcare.
n=672
What is a one year old expected to do in an IQ test? To not cry if they can’t suck their thumbs?
The IQ test is normalized to age and there is a specific test for children. Definitely these kids are suffering cognitively and this is how we measure that.
Let’s just hope that they can catch up and this doesn’t have a lasting impact.
I’ve certainly seen some intelligence variability in toddlers and am aware from epigenetic studies that stress can be transferred from fetus to child …but, I think a parent’s response to this is partly in his/her own hands. I think most parents (without covid-19) don’t interact with and/or teach their kids enough. My own parents certainly didn’t and I think this is worse these days with smart phones and the internet. I think parenting and social skills can be taught (maybe should be taught). I rarely use geometry in daily life, but am still very much affected by social skills and the after-affects of upbringing (as are we all - I am not throwing a pity-party). You can see a few genetic/ethnic groups who underwent huge amounts of stress and they seem to be doing very well.
Its good to study this topic, but I think the verdict isn’t clear or detailed enough yet.
Kind of disappointed that “news” sources clickbait un-reviewed studies like this.
A lot of times the study authors will reach out to these orgs to get air time. It’s pretty sketchy.
Children born during pandemic have lower IQs, US study finds
They are 18 months maximum. This is ridiculous
Seriously, at that age it seems ridiculous to label someone as having high or low IQ. Brain development isn’t even 100% complete until around 25 years old.
Also, IQ isn’t even a very meaningful metric. Most people who flaunt their IQ are people like Trump.
People also don’t realize that IQ is a terrible construct that is meant to measure the intelligence of a very specific group of people subject to that group’s perception on what is intelligent (see the dark history of IQ tests: https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_c_dombrowski_the_dark_history_of_iq_tests/transcript?language=en)
Yeah this doesn’t surprise me. In school I had to do developmental testing on a child and the parents in question were very proud of them never having been in daycare and also as a result never getting sick. I could almost visualize the wheels turning in the parent’s head when they realized the child was slightly behind in language and that daycare actually significantly socializes children. It’s not a replacement for parenting, but few things in life have the decency to be neatly black and white.
You hit on kind of an awkward aspect of this study. IQ is a somewhat overvalued logocentric measure itself, but it isn’t surprising that kids with less contact with peers and other adults would be at a disadvantage for that form of testing. Another thing is that, even though development occurs along regular lines with recognizable milestones, there is a great deal of variability in when kids actually cross them (not to mention that cognitive development is not all there is to the picture). IQ is a pretty narrow interpretation of development, especially if we are talking about toddlers.
What is annoying about this reporting is that it makes some pretty general inferences from an IQ measure–the sample size is OK but the population is limited. I have only skimmesd the actual article, but I wonder if they noted like others have before about the effects of increased screen time.
*sigh
