As I reported in Part 1, the long-term hangover of the covid panic is already showing up. The effects on adults — unemployment, economic hardship, mental health, surging rates of cancer and other normally treatable diseases — are bad enough. But the scars inflicted on a generation of children are proving much worse. Widespread mask-wearing is causing surging rates of speech problems in young children.
But for sheer bastardry, the pain being inflicted on the youngest and most helpless is unforgivable. A generation of “pandemic babies” is cursed with the sort of developmental crippling normally associated with the brutal state-run orphanages of communist regimes.
A study from Brown University in the US has found that children born since the beginning of the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance. By “significant”, they mean 22% lower.
Leveraging a large on-going longitudinal study of child neurodevelopment, we examined general childhood cognitive scores in 2020 and 2021 vs. the preceding decade, 2011-2019. We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic. Moreover, we find that males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected.
The first few years of a child’s life are some of their most developmentally significant. For the pandemic babies, those years have been blighted by the covidiocy of the elites.
These policies, meant to limit spread of the SARSCoV-2 virus, have closed daycares, schools, parks, and playgrounds, and have disrupted children’s educational opportunities, limited explorative play and interaction with other children, and reduced physical activity levels […]
Given these changes in children’s home, education, and social environments, it is not surprising that cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of child and adolescent mental health throughout the current pandemic have revealed increased stress, anxiety, and depression. Studies of child learning further show reduced academic growth in math and language arts in elementary and high school children.
But if older children are doing it hard, that’s nothing compared to what the researchers found is being inflicted on the very youngest children.
We find striking evidence of declining overall cognitive functioning in children beginning in 2020 and continuing through 2021 […]
Overall, we find that measured verbal, non-verbal, and overall cognitive scores are significantly lower since the beginning of the pandemic. Looking further, we find that children born before the pandemic and followed through the initial stages do not show a reduction in skills or performance, but rather that young infants born since the beginning of the pandemic show significantly lower performance than infants born before January 2019 […]
Work-from-home and shelter-in-place orders, for example, along with closed daycares, nurseries, and preschools may have dramatically changed the quantity and quality of parent, caregiver, and teach-child interaction and stimulation […] In addition, masks worn in public settings and in school or daycare settings may impact a range of early developing skills, such as attachment, facial processing, and socioemotional processing.
Medrxiv
Two Australian academics agree that the effect of the pandemic panic is dire for babies and toddlers.
Babies born after March 11 2020 will have only known a world in the grip of a pandemic. They may never have met anyone who isn’t their parent, or they may only ever have seen their grandparents from a distance. They certainly will not have had the same opportunities to interact with other children as those born in the years before.
The Conversation
In a final, cruel twist of the pandemic knife, the “laptop class” of mostly middle-class women who revelled in being able to work from home, watch Netflix and order in Amazon and UberEats deliveries are escaping the worst effects of the lockdowns they so vociferously defended on social media. The Brown University study found that male children and the children of the poor were the worst affected.
How proud they must be of their unflinching support for Dan and Jacinda. After all, who cares if a future generation of working-class boys has been developmentally crippled by the follies of the bourgeois elite?
