Babies Born During Pandemic Have Lower IQs, Research Finds

Children born during the COVID-19 pandemic have lower IQs due to reduced interactions during shutdowns and various restriction regimes, according to a recent study.

Researchers at Brown University in Rhode Island have found that babies born since March 2020 have weaker cognitive, verbal and motor skills than children born before the coronavirus.

The average IQ of children aged three months to three years fell from around 100 in the decade before the pandemic to 79 during this period.

And the fall was worse among children of poorer origins, scientists warned.

Lockdowns have meant children have much less interaction with the outside world, which led to “surprisingly” poor cognitive development.

Specialists said they were unsure whether or not the decline in development would affect children in adulthood. “Babies ‘brains are more malleable than adults’ brains,” and they can probably recover, they said.

Pediatrics Sean Deoni, lead author of the study, explained that the drop in IQ scores was significant. “It’s not subtle at all. In general, we do not observe things like that, apart from the main cognitive disorders, “he warned.

the to study, which has not been peer reviewed, has been published in Medrxiv. Scientists analyzed 672 children in Rhode Island, United States.

Of them, 308 were born before January 2019, 176 were born between January 2019 and March 2020 and 188 were born after July 2020.

They tested the children on verbal, non-verbal and early learning skills to assess their development. They did this by calculating an early compound instead of using the usual IQ test used for adults.

All the children were full term and the majority were white. Experts found that children from lower socioeconomic strata performed worse on tests.

Dr Deoni said: “Parents are stressed and exhausted. This interaction that the child would normally have diminished considerably”.

“Although lowering IQ at an early age does not guarantee that children will be less intelligent later in life, the ability to correct course is reduced as the child grows older,” he added.

According to the authors, the main factor behind the decline in test performance was parental stress while working from home.

They added that the use of masks by adults may also have affected the development of babies, as children were less able to learn from facial signals..

The authors, Sean Deoni, Jennifer Beauchemin, Alexandra Volpe and Viren D’Sa, pointed out in the scientific paper: “Fear of infection and possible job loss put stress on parents, while parents who could work from home faced challenges in both working and providing child care. full-time attentive children.”.

“For pregnant women, the fear of attending antenatal visits also increased the stress, anxiety and depression of the mother. Children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced their verbal, motor and cognitive performance compared to children born before the pandemic», They added.

In addition, they found that men and boys from lower socio-economic families were the most affected. “The results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 disease, environmental changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic significantly and negatively affect the development of infants and children. children.“, They detailed.

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