Data shows that although babies born during the first lockdown may have crawled more quickly than babies born before the epidemic, they achieved fewer developmental milestones at age one. Around 600,000 infants were born in Britain and 60,000 more in Ireland in 2020, a year in which Covid regulations and mask use prohibited numerous social activities, such as toddler rhymetimes, prenatal group trips, and cuddling with grandparents. Since then, parents and psychologists have wondered what effect such forced solitude has on infants’ social development.
Dr. Susan Byrne, a paediatric neurologist at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, remarked that the Irish lockdown in particular was an extremely strict lockdown. By the time they were 12 months old, one in four of the newborns hadn’t seen another kid their own age. ‘The families [we investigated] were in touch with just four other persons outside the family unit, on average, throughout the first six months’.
Byrne and her colleagues asked the parents of 309 ‘pandemic’ babies to evaluate their ability to crawl, pick up small objects with their thumb and index finger, express at least one specific and meaningful word, and seven other developmental milestones once they turned 12 months old in order to determine how this affected their development. The babies were all born between March and May 2020.
The study’s findings, which were reported in Archives of Disease in Childhood, revealed that the pandemic lockdown had a little but palpable impact on infants’ language and communication abilities: They had a lower likelihood of having one distinct and meaningful phrase (89% vs. 77%), being able to point at people or things (93% vs. 84%), or waving ‘bye-bye’ (94.5% vs. 88%). The fact that more of them could crawl (91% vs. 97.5%) may be related to the fact that they spent more time on the ground than in automobiles and strollers.
It’s intriguing since many of these newborns were at home and didn’t see many people depart, so they wouldn’t have had somebody to say ‘bye-bye,’ according to Byrne. Babies also frequently point when they encounter novel objects that they desire, yet if they hadn’t been going outdoors, they would have been familiar with everything around them. She emphasised that the gaps were minor and that there were many things parents could do to assist toddlers in catching up, such as reading and conversing with them frequently.
Because of their inherent resilience and curiosity, babies are likely to develop better social communication abilities when society begins to reemerge and their social networks expand, according to Byrne. However, in order to be sure that this is the case, this cohort as well as others must be followed up until they reach school age.
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