There’s no way you’d see that effect with a “study” of a handful of children that doesn’t even mention how many were infected.
Add me to the “clickbait” column. The hypothesis is certainly plausible, which is why the headline is attractive to click. But if there’s a real effect, we haven’t seen it, yet, and the studies that document it will be very much larger.
We gave this IQ test to children born in 2008-2010 and they all scored OK, but when we gave it to children born during the pandemic, none of them even seemed to be able to read it. Many of them completely ignored it, and just lay there and gurgled…
Yeah, but I think a lot of posters are getting hung up on “IQ” specifically. It’s not like we have absolutely no way of measuring infants’ cognitive development, but “significantly reduced verbal, motor and overall cognitive performance” doesn’t fit in a headline as well as “lower IQs.”
I did not read the study. There are well known developmental markers in a growing child. These include spheres such as motor skills, sounds and language, and so forth. The best one might do for a two year old might be to report delays in reaching these markers. There may be a good study to do on pandemic effects, and it might have to wait several years.
That caused a minor spit-take. Thank you for the laugh.
I think it’s been well established as a leading indicator among the anti-vaxxers.
Maybe- and I say maybe, because as far as I can tell there haven’t been any studies of what effects the pandemic had on interaction and screen time. I completely believe you when you say all the parents you know report that their kids screen-time has increased. But you also mentioned parents having to resort to screen-time in order for parents to get work done. Some parents have certainly resorted to screen time to get work done - but since there are so many possibilities of how parents dealt with work during the pandemic , I don’t think there’s any way to know at this point how many of those with children born during the pandemic had to do so.
What almost certainly did happen was that children had fewer interactions with people outside of their household - but I’m not at all certain that would greatly affect children who were born after July 2020. After all, they are only a year old at most.
The lack of interaction probably affected older kids more - my granddaughter is almost two and except for my house and the doctor’s office, the only place she has been is one trip to the zoo. No playgrounds, no restaurants, no stores, nothing. She has no experience at interacting with children ( she was only 4-5 months old during her short stint at daycare) Since her parents didn’t go anywhere together between March 2020 and July 2021 (when her baby brother was born) she wasn’t accustomed to being without them, which made the two days she spent with my husband and me while mom was in the hospital difficult for her.
Studies like the OP found (that or someone needs to clean their sources of info or bookmarks 
) should be expected when a fringe belief suddenly becomes supported by groups with money. The timing points at anti-vaccination, anti-mask or anti-education interests out there. In a word: Antiscience.
Sure that in this case it does not sound like the research benefits antivaxxers or proponents to send kids with no masks into the petri dish schools directly. But the sad reality is that the fringe, or the powerful groups now supporting that, will misinterpret or misuse the research for their own ends, including the ones against lockdowns or other non-pharmacological interventions against the pandemic.
This is a very old, but sadly effective tactic.
This is how it begins: Proponents of a fringe or non-mainstream scientific viewpoint seek added credibility. They’re sick of being taunted for having few (if any) peer reviewed publications in their favor. Fed up, they decide to do something about it.
These “skeptics” find what they consider to be a weak point in the mainstream theory and critique it. Not by conducting original research; they simply review previous work. Then they find a little-known, not particularly influential journal where an editor sympathetic to their viewpoint hangs his hat.
They get their paper through the peer review process and into print. They publicize the hell out of it. Activists get excited by the study, which has considerable political implications.
Before long, mainstream scientists catch on to what’s happening. They shake their heads. Some slam the article and the journal that published it, questioning the review process and the editor’s ideological leanings. In published critiques, they tear the paper to scientific shreds.
Embarrassed, the journal’s publisher backs away from the work. But it’s too late for that. The press has gotten involved, and though the work in question has been discredited in the world of science, partisans who favor its conclusions for ideological reasons will champion it for years to come.
The scientific waters are muddied. The damage is done.
What is new is that they are not bothering nowadays to wait for the peer review! In the case the research might be sound, another pseudo-science tactic is also being used, that of misusing the research to reach for solutions that not even the authors of the paper would agree.
By “work” I didn’t just mean employment. I was able to take leave to help run our two-kid school, and so was my spouse. But we still needed time to do other work, whether employment or housework or cooking meals.
Normally our school-aged kids would be out of the house for hours every weekday, getting educated. Since covid, they’re at home, 24-7. I can try to occupy them with better things, bit that’s more work. Sometimes, I just need to cook in peace.
I think the best advice for news stories like this is that when you see the words “not yet peer-reviewed”, you should quit reading unless you are yourself someone who could have been asked by a journal in that field to peer-review the paper. If you don’t see any mention of peer-reviewing, you might want to do a search to find out if there are any other news stories about this paper. This is no proof that these news stories are peer-reviewed. Sometimes news sources simply copy other sources’ claims without checking if the claims are peer-reviewed. You might in your searching find a copy of a journal article in the field making this claim. However, one such article is not in itself proof of the claim. Sometimes academic journals make mistakes in accepting a paper. There are also tenth-rate journals that don’t try very hard to do peer-reviewing.
Yes, what if canine IQs have dropped because their owners are keeping them at home instead of going out to socialize with other dogs and people at dog parks and the like? I hate to think of all the stupid Schnauzers and dumbass Dobermans resulting from the pandemic. 