FE ATUR E
Five ways to stimulate your child’s brain development, with support at every step When the pandemic lockdown began in March 2020, I found myself facing the 20 wide-eyed new parents in my Program for Early Parent Support (PEPS; peps.org) parent-infant cooperative class on Zoom for the very first time. The class I was teaching had just shifted from meeting in person to convening online. Our in-person class had felt more like a party than a class, with witty banter and cocktails replaced by stories of baby antics and oxytocin. In that first Zoom meeting, bewilderment abounded. There were many questions, few answers. Of the many questions, one surfaced as a common refrain: What will we do without our baby parties? In other words, will the babies be all right with all the social distancing? When the question came up, I was transported back to a child development course I had taken years before. The course stressed that infants and toddlers fare best with one-on-one care as opposed to receiving care in a group setting. At the time, I had not yet worked with infants and I was not yet a parent myself. I was, however, a critical consumer of research. We know that child development research carries bias. Much of it has been conducted in university settings, where researchers and their subjects tend to be white, well-educated and Western. Enter racial, class and cultural bias. An extrovert myself, I questioned that a one-on-one care setting
was always best for all infants. The professor rolled her eyes loudly at me, and for good reason. Every child development specialist I have since encountered ascribes to “attachment theory,” which holds that infants must form a “secure base” with at least one primary caregiver in order for healthy development to unfold. This is why Washington state requires a 1-4 caregiver-to-infant ratio for licensed care settings, even though this requirement makes infant care more expensive than college tuition. This is also why orphanages no longer exist for young children. Even an extrovert like me, who loves nothing more than a rockin’ baby party, now accepts attachment theory as fact. Knowing this, child development specialists by and large predicted that infants would fare better in the pandemic than older children, whose healthy development rests more on peer and group social interactions. “Yes, the infants will be all right,” we assured the parents. “They learn their social skills from their caregivers, not from one another,” we said. “Just take care of yourself so you can take care of them,” we said. So, were we right? So many months later into the pandemic, are socially isolated infants and toddlers faring better than others? Yes … and no. It seems we were right that infants didn’t need peer socialization, but perhaps we were answering the wrong question. The question should have been: If caregivers of infants have minimal support during the pandemic, will the infants be okay? A longitudinal study conducted across five universities indicates that children who were born during the pandemic have markedly lower scores on standard measures of verbal, motor and overall cognitive ability than those born before the pandemic. The study has been measuring IQ in infants in Rhode Island since 2011. While children born in 2019 had no changes in IQ after the pandemic, children born in 2020 scored lower in verbal, motor and overall cognitive development — corresponding to an average IQ score that is 22 points lower than that of their 2019 counterparts.
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