The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected many different aspects of people’s lives. There is great fear for the social development of children due to being under lockdown for a more than a year of their lives especially since they are in such a vital stage in social development. Since children are locked up in their homes with only their parents and immediate family members there has been very little, if any, interaction with other people outside of their circle. This is especially true for ‘pandemic babies,’ which are the babies that have been born during the pandemic, as they most likely have not seen many people other than their parents or anyone that lives with them. In the talk with Dr. Maggie Guy spoke of how children that have a possibility of developing autism spectrum disorder and those who have it process faces in the brain. Since these lockdowns have stopped many social interactions, it is interesting to see how children will be processing faces because of only seeing the same faces every day. In a news article from The New York Times, Elizabeth Preston discusses this topic and the difficulties that could occur especially when distant family starts to visit.
Babies go through development very quickly in their first few years of life so there could be certain things that are not yet know about the development of the pandemic babies. The brain itself develops fast as the baby is introduced to many interactions with people and their environment. In the article that Dr. Guy gave her talk about, it states that two studies showed “substantial changes in the first years of life” when it came to P400 activity in an ERP (Conte et al., p. 2). These results show that the changes in the brain happen quickly as in only a year the P400 activity changed a lot. These substantial changes that happen could be due to the exposure to seeing many people and being able to understand the differences in the world. Also, in the research article it is said that “the N290 increase in amplitude with increasing age, but only at 9 and 12 months N290 amplitudes do appear peaked and larger for faces than objects” (Conte et al., p. 7). This information tells that during this time there is a focus in the infant’s brain on the understanding of faces. Since there is a limited amount of faces that the children are seeing there could be difficulty later for the children to understand different facial expressions and facial features.
There is a lot that the baby learns in its first year of life and when the connection from the world is cut there is few things that the baby can learn at home only seeing its immediate family. Interactions with other people are very important for the children in general as this is how they develop socially. In The New York Times article, Dr. Schoppe-Sullivan says that “infancy is the period during which children are biologically predisposed to form close relationships with important caregivers” (Preston). This shows how vital it is for babies to be in contact with others that are trusted by the parents for proper social development. Social interactions from a young age help make children be more open and less worried about talking to others in the future. The development that occurs during the early years of a child are important for their future. In The New York Times article, Dr. Suárez-Orozco says that “the psychological distress these children felt after reuniting gradually ebbed” (Preston). This shows that even if social issues do develop after this pandemic due to the limited social interactions that children had during the pandemic, they will slowly learn what they did not before. The social development of infants will happen after the pandemic, but it will take longer than those that are already older.
COVID-19 has slowed the world and may have even slowed down the development of infants. Even though the article by Elizabeth Preston states that children are very resilient it is still a curiosity to see if there will be significant developmental changes in these children. There is much to research in how these children will develop as they have been under lockdown and have a very different experience than that of previous generations.
References
Conte, S., Richards, J. E., Guy, M. W., Xie, W., & Roberts, J. E. (2020). Face-sensitive brain responses in the first year of life. NeuroImage, 211, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116602
Preston, E. (2021, March 29). Your Pandemic Baby’s Coming Out Party. The New York Times. Retrieved October 22, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/well/pandemic-reunions-family-distance-babies.html
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