Newborns during the first Covid-19 pandemic-induced lockdown took longer than babies born before the pandemic to reach numerous developmental milestones, according to a recent study published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
The study hypothesises that they may have crawled more quickly.
The ability to crawl, pick up small things (with the thumb and index finger), and express at least one specific and meaningful word were among the seven developmental milestones that researchers in Ireland asked the parents of 309 ‘pandemic’ kids who were born between March and May 2020 to rate.
Irish lockdowns in particular were ‘extremely rigorous,’ according to Dr. Susan Byrne, a paediatric neurologist at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland who was also involved in the study.
One in four of the babies hadn’t encountered another child their own age by the time they were 12 months old, she continued. ‘During the first six months, the families (which they analysed) were in contact with only four other persons outside the family unit, on average.’
The Royal College of Surgeons Ireland and University College Cork researchers also discovered a slight but discernible difference of 12% in the infants’ linguistic and communication abilities in comparison to the babies before the pandemic.
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