Did the COVID pandemic stunt kids’ development?

[MUSIC PLAYING] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday.

For years, at bus stops, in classrooms, at PTA meetings, parents and teachers have been having conversations in hushed inside voices about whether the kids are all right after COVID. Did the pandemic set kids back emotionally, developmentally, academically? Usually in these conversations, there is a lot of concern, there’s a lot of hand-wringing, and there’s not a lot of data.

So what does the research say? 17 new studies looking at kids in six countries attack this question from different angles, and they appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Child Development, out this fall. Joining me now are two of the researchers involved, Dr. Anna Johnson, Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, who helped compile this special issue, and Dr. Stephanie Jones, Professor of Early Childhood Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass, who led one of the studies in this package. Anna, Stephanie, thank you for being here.

ANNA JOHNSON: Yeah, thrilled to be here. Thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s get into it. I mean, Anna, give us an overview of the research. Top-level, are the kids OK?

ANNA JOHNSON: Yeah. I Would say mostly yeah. Mostly yes. And that comes from, as you mentioned earlier, I co-edited a special issue of Child Development, alongside colleagues Seth Pollak at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Gaby Livas at UT Austin. And we compiled these 17 research studies from across the globe, covering multiple child ages, multiple cultural contexts, both high-income and lower-income, urban and rural, East Coast/West Coast of the US, and beyond the US.

And what we see there is a story that I would say is largely optimistic. Of the 17 studies, nine studies focused on mental health, and only one found large negative effects. Two studies actually found improvements. And I think that that’s really important to acknowledge. Five of the studies found small or very small effects.

Of the seven studies that focused on cognitive or academic outcomes, none of them found what we might refer to as large effects. So we have benchmarks in research for effect sizes. None of them were large. Three found moderate effects, and four found very small effects. And interestingly, the one study we had on biological aging among infants found no effects at all.

So there were some positive effects in there. There were some null effects in there. To the extent that we had negative effects, they were mostly minor or moderate. So I would say it’s largely a hopeful story.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I want to get into the details a little bit, but before we do that, where did we get this idea that kids’ academic performance took a hit? Was there evidence of that, or people just assuming that’s happening?

ANNA JOHNSON: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things that we’ve noticed in the literature, and I think have fed a lot of our popular narrative and our own personal kind of parenting perspective, was these kind of acute pandemic-period response studies that– research did what research does, which is mount studies as quickly as possible to answer urgent scientific questions. So in the throes of the pandemic, people started fielding surveys, you know, has conflict in your household increased since schools closed? Are you punishing your child more? Is your child acting out more? You know, quick-response surveys.

We call those cross-sectionals, so it’s like point-in-time analysis. And it did look, initially, like things were pretty bad. Parents were stressed and arguing. Kids were acting out and showing signs of worry and withdrawal. We knew kids were isolated from their peers and missing out on instructional time in school.

And then we started to see these test score data. So NAEP, which is our nation’s report card, coming out in 2022 showing fourth graders in 2022 were behind fourth graders who had taken the NAEP in 2019, for instance. That really contributed, I think, to a conversation about kids’ academic skills, in particular, and social skills taking a hit. The problem with those kinds of studies– or I shouldn’t say the problem. They’re incredibly useful.

The limitation of those studies is just that you have either a single point-in-time snapshot which looked pretty bleak, or you have a comparison of two cohorts of kids, one of whom experienced a pandemic and all of the stressors that came with it and one of whom did not. And so to say that lower scores in one group is a cause of the pandemic, maybe. But without knowing how those exact kids were doing before, it’s really hard to what COVID did. Did it deepen existing trajectories or patterns, or introduce new problems?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Stephanie, you study executive function. How does that show up in kids? Is it like being able to sit at the dinner table or not having a tantrum if your banana’s peeled the wrong way?

STEPHANIE JONES: Yeah, I would say it’s definitely those things, but technically, it’s a set of core cognitive processes that govern things like working memory, something called inhibitory control, flexibility. And all of those things support attention, emotion and behavior management, and the kinds of things that would help a child to remember the instructions when they’re getting the materials in the classroom, to manage frustration when something doesn’t go their way, to put their hand up when they’re so excited to share something, but they have to wait.

So executive function supports these really foundational social, emotional, and academic behaviors that play out in early childhood and in the classroom. They expand rapidly. They are growing. Children are learning them and practicing them in that kind of early childhood period, the sort of transition– the early childhood, preschool period and the transition into schooling. And they are supported through high-quality interactions, through routines and predictable things happening, all of the kinds of things that really were challenged during the pandemic.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You started tracking three and four-year-olds, and you followed them for years, till they were 10 and 11. What did you find happened with executive functioning?

STEPHANIE JONES: So this is a large-scale longitudinal study that we did in Massachusetts with a very large population-based sample. And exactly right, we began when the children were three and four back in 2017, and we followed them each year through the period of the pandemic until just a year or two ago, until when they were 10 and 11 or so.

And that structure of the data allowed us to compare where children were on executive function after the start of the pandemic and its acute period to where they were on executive function beforehand, which is like the miracle of longitudinal data. It really gives us a sense of a trend and then a change in that trend.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What did you find?

STEPHANIE JONES: We found that children’s scores on executive function dropped by nearly half a standard deviation. And that is something that you rarely see in child development literature.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s profound. I mean, that sounds like a big drop.

STEPHANIE JONES: We were stunned by it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really?

STEPHANIE JONES: Yeah. I mean, it’s just not typically what you would see. We did the thing that I know Anna does, that all of us do, which is that we do as much as we can with our data to make the finding go away. We run different types of models. We include different types of controls. We look for other factors that could explain what’s happening, and try and include them to see if it will make the finding go away. And we spent a bunch of years, actually, doing that.

And it was a pretty robust finding. It didn’t change when we did other things to the model. So we feel confident in it. And the story that I think it tells is that it’s not necessarily something about what children have or don’t have or can and cannot do. I think it’s more of a story about what happened to all of us and to families during this particular time. The pandemic introduced tremendous amounts of stress and strain to everybody, like across the board.

Children were sort of separated– in Massachusetts, absolutely, because everything in Massachusetts basically shut down on the same day– separated from their peer groups, from their socializing experiences, from the kinds of things that are in their everyday that are the direct supports for developing and practicing and using executive function. So in hindsight, I guess, the finding was substantial in my head, but also, when you look at what happened to people, not a total surprise.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. Anna, I want to hear from you on this because you were just mentioning that you’re feeling pretty optimistic. How do you square this piece of data?

ANNA JOHNSON: So we also had a study that had been in the field since 2016, when our kids were also three years old in preschool. An exclusively low-income sample, in this case, in a different state that also remained closed for an entire school year, more or less. Our kids were in first grade in this study when schools closed, and returned in the fall of third grade. And we see very similar effects on executive functioning to what Stephanie is reporting. And there’s another study in the special issue. Different population, different sample, similar results.

So when I refer to studies that have moderate effects, I’m thinking of these studies. And I guess when I say I feel hopeful, it’s because there are outcomes on which we certainly see large negative effects from COVID. And I would call out executive functioning and math as the two areas that really seemed to take substantial hits and slower to recover. I will say there’s evidence of recovery.

But when I say I feel hopeful, it’s because there are so many outcomes that were looked at in this special issue, in our study, in Stephanie’s study and others. And across multiple sets of outcomes, I would say you just see real variation, both in how large the negative effect was initially– in some cases, it was quite small or nonexistent– and how quickly recovery began and/or how substantial the recovery has been. So for instance, literacy, reading and internalizing behavior– internalizing behavior is like worry and sadness– those things seem to show smaller effects and to recover more quickly.

So there’s a real mix here. Executive functioning and math, again, as Stephanie said, like, executive functioning needs relationships to develop. It needs classrooms for kids to learn how to regulate. It’s very hard to practice the skill of not raising your hand first or shouting out the answer if you don’t have a classroom to practice in. It’s very hard to practice the skill of everybody come to the rug and find your spot if there’s no rug and no spot.

Math, likewise, is very hard to teach at home. So parents don’t tend to do math bedtime stories. Parents do reading bedtime stories. We do a lot of language with our kids at home, informally, formally, whether it’s reading the back of the cereal box in the morning or reading a bedtime story at night. Math is typically not something parents do as confidently or as consistently at home.

And so with a missed year of school and parents’ lives disrupted in other ways, it makes sense that math would have taken a larger hit, for instance, than language and literacy. So I say the same thing for executive functioning. I think my hopefulness comes not from no sizable negative effects, but rather real variation in where the effects were and the promise of recovery once kids were back in their normal environments.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We have to take a break, but when we come back, I want to get a little personal, if that’s OK. Is that OK?

ANNA JOHNSON: Love it.

STEPHANIE JONES: Totally.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. Stay with us.

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Before we move on, we know that screens impact kids’ executive functioning abilities. We’ve covered it on this show. That must complicate the findings.

STEPHANIE JONES: Yeah, I mean, I’m not a tech researcher. I haven’t done a study about screens and executive function. But as I put together pieces, I can see a story about the connection between the ubiquity of screen use, its properties, and how children are pulled into them, and the kinds of things that are then missed or lost or not happening and executive function.

So I can definitely see a story about that. I think the pandemic, in ways that were very helpful in many, many, many circumstances, maybe most of them, the screens that we have available to us helped us during the pandemic. They became ubiquitous in children’s lives in a kind of different way, even.

I think what’s happened is that they didn’t go away afterwards. It wasn’t like we went back to the pre-COVID times and all the screens went away that weren’t there before. And so I definitely see a potential linkage between that ubiquity and something we might see among children today in executive function. I don’t have the data, and I haven’t done it yet, but I would put a bet on it.

ANNA JOHNSON: I think we need a part two and part three, where we talk about all the other kind of societal constellation of confounding factors. Screen use is one of them. We know that was already ticking up before COVID. We know that kids were already performing lower than they had been historically before COVID. So clearly, there’s other societal stuff going on, from grade inflation to the way parents interact with schools and teachers to the presence of screens in schools and at home. So lots of other factors, too, to consider.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You mentioned you both are parents. Did this feel personal to you, this work?

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STEPHANIE JONES: Both of us took a deep breath. For those of you who are listening, we each took a deep breath in, thinking. Yeah, I mean, as a developmental psychologist, it’s insane how personal it all is, because you’re looking back and you’re thinking about and you read this thing or you have this finding, and you’re just like, wait, oh my gosh, I wasn’t responsive and emotionally warm at dinner last night. And like, it’s over. So–

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m so glad I don’t know what you know, Stephanie. It’s easy to beat yourself up, even with limited knowledge.

ANNA JOHNSON: It’s a blessing.

STEPHANIE JONES: It is one of those things, a hazard of the profession. But I care deeply about child development and young children, and I feel like this work is personal. It is about how we care for those who are young and vulnerable and learning. We want to protect their learning, and we want to support them. And so it feels personal in that way, to me.

It also feels like– I feel like I can look back at what was happening in my own household, crazy like everybody’s, and reflect more deeply on what I was observing among my children, who were struggling, because everybody was struggling. And so I also see it as a pattern of findings that helps us understand, let’s say, for our data, children who are 13 and 14 years old today.

If they were struggling at ages six and seven and executive function was sort of taking a hit, it helps us explain some of what we hear from those who are teaching in middle school and working with kids about what they’re observing. And I can see a connection between those two things. So for all those random reasons, it does feel quite personal, at times.

ANNA JOHNSON: Yeah, and I think for the exact same reasons, I care deeply about what I do professionally, and of course I look at my own kids and I say, does this hold water, is this reflecting, does this make sense, does it resonate. But the low-income sample we’ve been following in Oklahoma, since 2016– so a decade, and we’re going to follow them through high school– is a population that we anticipated, including their parents, would have really been hit very hard. It’s a majority non-white, low-income urban school district.

And we saw some real evidence of promise there, where parents, a third of our parents in that sample reported that the impact of the pandemic was neutral to positive. Many of them were relieved, I think, from jobs that were stressful and unpleasant, and found time to spend with their children that they might not have had otherwise. So think that there are these kind of moments to find that are very affirming. They’re not all of them.

And I think the other thing that feels personal for me is this idea that knowing about pre-existing risk helps us understand who suffered the most. So Stephanie was saying in her example, a kid who was struggling with executive function at six or seven, how are they doing at 13 or 14?

What we see in the 17 studies of this special issue, consistently across all the studies that looked at this, is that the biggest predictor of who suffered the most is whether there were pre-existing signs of risk or vulnerability. So families who said I don’t feel a negative impact, I feel like this was OK, those kids maybe did OK. And families who were already struggling suffered more.

FLORA LICHTMAN: There’s this line that gets thrown around all the time. I feel like it’s almost a catchphrase, kids are resilient. They’re resilient. They’ll be all right. They’re resilient. What does this work, this body of work, tell us about that? Can we get a little more granular, I guess?

ANNA JOHNSON: Yeah, I mean, I think kids are resilient, and I think human development marches on. And I think no study showed a flat line on the other side of COVID. There was no stunting. Kids did not stop growing after COVID. And I think that’s incredibly important and another reason that I feel hopeful, is that the lines all trended up once kids got back into their regular routines.

Are kids where they would have been in the absence of COVID? That’s essentially an unanswerable question because we all experienced COVID. But I would say there’s true signs of resilience across multiple domains of development. And at the same time, there are areas, like executive functioning and math, where kids are notably behind where we would expect them to be based on their age. And like Stephanie said, in some cases, it’s quite stunning.

STEPHANIE JONES: So I would agree with all of that. And I would just add to it that resilience is a product of a number of things. It’s facing challenge and adversity with support. And so the lesson about resilience is when we are facing challenge and adversity, whether it’s globally, population-wide, or just in our own home or at the school or in our neighborhood or whatever it is, we have to be thinking about the supports we put in place to help children, to help adults navigate that challenge.

Resilience is not inside a person as just a thing. It’s about these two things working together, like what is the challenge and what are the supports. The lesson for us is how can we build the right supports for executive function, for math, for reading, for language, for parents who are facing all sorts of stuff? That I think we have to really, really remember. It’s really important for the next time serious things happen, and for the everyday, because it’s still happening.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. That’s such a useful ending thought, because of course, this is not going to be the last challenge that this generation will face. You’ll have to come back.

STEPHANIE JONES: We would love to.

ANNA JOHNSON: Please.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That would be great. Dr. Anna Johnson, Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Dr. Stephanie Jones, Professor of Early Childhood Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. And if you have a comment or a question or anything you want us to look into, leave us a voicemail. 877-4-SCIFRI is our number. We’ll catch you next time. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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