Staying on a game until you finish it, remembering two instructions one after the other, waiting your turn, calming down after a frustration. They seem like tiny gestures. At four years old they talk about how well a child is able to govern attention, emotions and behavior, especially when there are other children around. It is precisely here that a fragility emerges among the little ones born during the first lockdown of 2020. Today they are six years old, they attend school and they remember little or nothing of that period. Their development, however, began inside closed houses, with few faces, few voices and minimal social opportunities.
According to a study published in Archives of Disease in Childhoodapproximately one in three children examined showed support needs in executive functions. We talk about the skills needed to control an impulse, change tasks, remember an assignment, plan and find a solution when something goes wrong.
Who are the children studied
The research involved 205 children born in England between 23 March and 23 June 2020, during the strictest phase of the first British lockdown. The restrictions then returned on several occasions and accompanied much of their first 18 months.
At that time, visits from friends and relatives, baby groups, educational activities, parks and meetings with peers were suspended or severely limited. Many childcare professionals had also been moved due to the Covid emergency and in-person appointments had become rare.
At four years old, the children took standardized tests on language, vocabulary and reasoning with pictures and symbols. Twenty-five were evaluated at school, the other 180 at home, through multiple online meetings organized with the same device and the same researchers. The parents then filled out questionnaires on their children’s daily behavior, motor skills and executive functions. And it is precisely from their answers that the most delicate data comes.
The difficulty appears in everyday gestures
Compared to values collected before the pandemic, children scored lower in working memory, planning, organization, emotional control and the ability to move from one situation to another.
In a classroom it means struggling to start an activity, losing track of an assignment, getting distracted easily or needing more time to change your behavior after being reminded by an adult. A third of the sample achieved scores compatible with a need for support in these areas.
The gap became even more apparent when researchers compared the same children’s executive functions and nonverbal reasoning. In this last test, based on the recognition of relationships between images and symbols, the results were even higher than expected for the age.
The children, therefore, showed good cognitive resources, accompanied by greater effort in transforming them into organized behavior. Understanding what to do and being able to do it while staying focused are two different steps. Among the children born during the lockdown, the second one seemed more fragile.
According to the researchers, the limited variety of interactions experienced in the first year may have played a role. An infant also learns to regulate his or her behavior by meeting less familiar people, entering new environments, waiting, observing other children, and trying to get a response from adults other than the parents. In 2020 this daily gym remained closed along with everything else.
Language has recovered
Regarding language, the picture changes. Overall scores were within or above expected. Sentence comprehension, receptive vocabulary, and nonverbal reasoning showed particularly strong results.
However, the comparison with the cognitive abilities of individual children reveals a difference between understanding and speaking. Receptive language, that is, the ability to understand words and sentences, proceeded at the same level as reasoning. Expressive language, used to construct sentences, apply grammatical rules, and choose words, lagged slightly behind that potential.
However, for age, expressive vocabulary exceeded expectations. The weakness emerged above all in internal comparison: those children reasoned better than they were able to express themselves. In the test dedicated to grammatical structures, 5.4% obtained very low scores, compared to the 2% expected from the reference values.
The increased amount of time spent with parents may have protected understanding. Conversations with less familiar people, playing with peers and the need to make oneself understood outside the home instead train language production in a different way. Precisely the experiences that were missed the most during the lockdown. Motor skills were also age appropriate, although slightly lower than the level of reasoning shown by the children.
Before talking about “lockdown generation”
The study photographs an association and leaves open the question of the causes. In this first phase, there is no control group made up of English peers born after the restrictions. The results were compared with prepandemic normative data and, for some trials, with values obtained in US children.
Executive functions were also assessed through parents’ stories. Family stress, adult mental health and difficulties experienced during the pandemic may also have influenced their perception of their children’s behavior.
Families joined voluntarily and around three in four parents had a degree, a higher percentage than the English population of the same age group. This could at least partially explain the high scores observed in language and reasoning. At the same time, more concerned families may have been more inclined to participate.
The next phases of the research involve a direct evaluation of executive functions and comparison with children born after the lockdown. They will also serve to distinguish the burden of isolation from that of parental stress, increased time in front of screens and changes in children’s habits that have continued after the pandemic.
Meanwhile these children are already in the classrooms. The researchers suggest interventions aimed at the whole class, with activities capable of training attention, emotional regulation, planning and expressive language, avoiding transforming a date of birth into a clinical label. The lockdown ended years ago. The children who have gone through the first year of life, however, have just arrived at school.
