Lockdown babies may communicate slower but crawl faster, study says

Experts say that children’s early years are the most formative – their brains soaking up every interaction and experience, positive and negative, to form the neural connections that will serve them for the rest of their lives.

For the “lockdown babies” cohort, the “first year of life was very different from pre-pandemic babies,” Susan Byrne, a pediatric neurologist at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and lead author of the study, told The Washington Post.

But she and the other authors of the study have a message for parents: Don’t worry. “Babies are resilient and inquisitive by nature,” they note, and with the right support will likely bounce back.

Pregnancy complications increased during the pandemic. Nobody knows exactly why.

While the pandemic isn’t over and experts say it could be years before they have a more complete picture of its impact on children, parents around the world have already started reporting differences in their lockdown babies.

When 33-year-old Chi Lam had her first child, Adriana, in April 2020, England was in lockdown. Most people were not allowed to leave their homes without a “reasonable excuse”. Her parents and in-laws who were in Hong Kong were also unable to visit her because Hong Kong closed its border.

As a result, For the first few months of Adriana’s life, it was “just the three of us,” Lam told the Post. There were no play dates or visits from family and friends, and Adriana was not regularly exposed to children her own age until she was 1.

Lam believes the continued isolation has had some impact on her daughter Adriana. During her two-year evaluation, doctors told Lam that Adriana had “weak” gross motor skills — actions like jumping and walking that engage the whole body. “I think that’s because because of the pandemic, we only let her play in the park when she turned about 1 because we didn’t think it was safe,” Lam said. Adriana was also easily startled by loud noises such as motorcycle exhausts.

It’s difficult, says Lam, to disentangle how much of that is inherent in Adriana and how much is related to the unusual circumstances of her first year of life. But her observations echo the findings of studies suggesting that lockdowns and the pandemic have indeed affected children — although to what extent and through what mechanisms remains a largely open question.

The Irish study, published this month in the British Medical Journal, asked parents of 309 babies born between March and May 2020 to report on their child’s ability to reach 10 developmental milestones by age 1 – including the ability to crawl, stack stones and show objects. The researchers compared these parents’ responses to data collected from over 1,600 babies as part of a large study that followed babies born in Ireland between 2008 and 2011 and assessed their development over time.

There were some small but significant differences between the two groups. Fewer babies in the study were able to wave goodbye — 87.7 percent versus 94.4 percent, point to objects around them — 83.8 percent versus 92.8 percent or say at least one “distinct and meaningful word.” – 76.6 percent compared to 89.3 percent – on their 12-month assessment, according to their parents. However, they were more likely to be able to crawl by 1 year of age than their pre-pandemic peers. The researchers found no significant differences in the other six categories.

Studies based on observations can identify differences but do not shed light on the reason for the difference. However, the authors of the Irish study have a few theories.

They suggest the babies in the lockdown cohort may have had fewer visitors and therefore fewer opportunities to learn to say goodbye. With limited excursions outside the home, babies may have seen fewer objects to point to. And they may have “heard a narrower repertoire of speech and seen fewer unmasked faces speaking to them” due to lockdown measures.

Conversely, lockdown babies may have learned to crawl faster because they spent more time at home playing on the floor “rather than going out in cars and strollers”.

“The jury is still out on the impact this pandemic will have on this generation,” Dani Dumitriu, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University who was not involved in the Irish study, told The Post.

Dumitriu, who co-authored a separate study on babies born in 2020, called the results reassuring. “They don’t find any major developmental delays, just like we didn’t.”

The pandemic has brought something positive to some people – resilience

The study, which was peer-reviewed, has some limitations. It relies on parents’ observations of their own children, which may be erroneous or incomplete. There were demographic differences between the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic babies’ populations, and in each case parents were asked to assess their children’s development “in a slightly different way”.

What’s needed, say the authors and other experts, is a large-scale study that will track babies over time and measure their development in a standardized way — called a longitudinal cohort study. The authors of this study assessed the cohort of lockdown babies at age 2 using a standardized set of developmental questionnaires and hope to publish their findings, which are currently being reviewed, in a follow-up paper.

Meanwhile, the study’s authors say that with the right support, most babies can overcome any delay caused by the pandemic. Researchers who studied this cohort of babies have urged governments to provide more resources to families of lockdown babies – particularly the most vulnerable – and to follow those babies over time to ensure there aren’t long-term ones there are delays. “If we notice a delay, we can intervene quickly and get the child back on track,” explains Dumitriu.

Raising a Child Under 12 by the Age of Delta: ‘It’s Like a Fire Alarm Every Day’

Ultimately, Byrne is confident that “with the reopening… babies are really going to thrive.”

“There is so much scope for plasticity in the brains of babies and children,” she told the Post.

Lamb is too optimistic that Adriana will catch up with any delays as she ages. “People around me tell me that once they go back to school, they’ll be fine,” she told the Post. “I think so.”