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Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns led to sweeping changes in the everyday lives of children and families, including school closures, remote work and learning, and social distancing. To date no study has examined whether these profound changes in young children’s day to day social interactions impacted the development of social cognition skills in early childhood. To address this question, we compared the performance of two cohorts of 3.5- to 5.5-year-old children tested before and after the COVID-19 lockdowns on several measures of false-belief understanding, a critical social cognition skill that undergoes important developments in this age range. Controlling for age and language skills, children tested after the pandemic demonstrated significantly worse false-belief understanding than those tested before the pandemic, and this difference was larger for children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. These results suggest that the pandemic negatively impacted the development of social cognition skills in early childhood, especially for lower SES children.
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Supporting Early Language by Supporting Systemic Solutions
A large body of research shows connections between infants’ and toddlers’ home language input and a wide range of receptive and expressive early language skills. Some facets of caretaker input and early language skills are associated with socioeconomic status (SES), though not all. Given the complexity of language learning, language use, and its many pathways of connection to SES, testing causal links between these dimensions is difficult at best. Interventions aimed at changing parent language use have seen mixed success, in part because “language infusions” generally fail to target underlying challenges facing underresourced families, and perhaps because parent language is the wrong target. System-level interventions such as paid parental leave and expansion and enrichment of childcare and early education options hold greater promise for improving families’ lives, with positive repercussions for a broad range of family and child outcomes, including linguistic ones.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2337766
- PAR ID:
- 10625430
- Publisher / Repository:
- Sage
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2372-7322
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 156 to 163
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/23727322241268909
