Study: Pandemic babies show markedly lower IQs, as stress is high, stimulation is low

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A university study is showing a disturbing trend: Babies born during the Covid-19 pandemic and children in general are showing significantly lower cognitive levels when compared with children born before 2020.

Rather than IQs of over 100, children are clocking in closer to 78, a dramatic drop in cognitive functions.

With Covid-19 triggering the closure of businesses, nurseries, schools and playgrounds, parents have been stressed out, their children lacked adequate stimulation, and researchers measured a noticeable difference in youngsters compared to the decade studied just prior to the pandemic policies.

“With limited stimulation at home and less interaction with the world outside, pandemic-era children appear to have scored shockingly low on tests designed to assess cognitive development,” wrote the study’s author Sean Deoni, associate professor of pediatrics at Brown University.

“We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic. Moreover, we find that males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected. Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated COVID-19 pandemic is significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development,” the study reports.

Since the beginning in March of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic economic shutdowns “brought about significant upheavals to the social, economic, and public health environments in which children live, grow and play. While children, and those under age 5, have largely been spared from the severe health and mortality complications associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, they have not been immune to the impact of the stay-at-home, masking, and social distancing policies,” the study says.

“These policies, meant to limit spread of the SARS- CoV-2 virus, have closed daycares, schools, parks, and playgrounds [3, 4], and have disrupted children’s educational opportunities, limited explorative play and interaction with other children, and reduced physical activity levels. From the beginning of the pandemic, there has been concern that these public-health policies would adversely impact infant and early child development and mental health. While there is no past analogue or example of non-conflict related wide-spread and prolonged lock-downs from which to draw information from, concern for child development stemmed principally from the known impact that family and home stress, parent and child anxiety, lack of stimulating environments, and other economic and environmental adversities can have on the developing infant and child brain.”

The study looked at children in Rhode Island, with 672 children from the pandemic era included in the study. Of these, 188 were born after July 2020 and 308 were born prior to January 2019, while 176 were born between January 2019 and March 2020. The children included in the study were born full-term, had no developmental disabilities, and were primarily white.

Rhode Island schools were closed from March 16, 2020 through the beginning of the 2021 school year. But most schools continued to have a hybrid in-person/online learning until January 2021.

Daycare centers were closed for three months, and reopened with reduced capacity. Stay-home orders were in effect from March until May, 2020. Indoor and outdoor mask policies were also in place throughout 2020 and much of 2021, following CDC guidance.

From 2009, Brown University and the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University has been home to a longitudinal study of child health and neurodevelopment, called the RESONANCE study. This gave researchers a good baseline of information about children’s cognitive abilities.

The infant brain is born with immense capacity to learn, remodel, and adapt, but is sensitive and vulnerable to neglect and environmental exposures that begin even before birth, the researchers note.

Maternal health, including depression, stress, and anxiety during pregnancy, can impact the developing fetal and infant brain structure and connectivity, leading to potential delays in motor, cognitive, and behavioral development, the researchers said.

“Given these changes in children’s home, education, and social environments, it is not surprising that cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of child and adolescent mental health throughout the current pandemic have revealed increased stress, anxiety, and depression. Studies of child learning further show reduced academic growth in math and language arts in elementary and high school children,” the researchers noted.

Read the study at this link.

Read: Anchorage parents set to sue schools over mask mandate

Read: Suzanne Downing: The masking of America, September, 2020

20 COMMENTS

  1. The people planning this are getting much better results than they expected. It will make it much easier to subjugate a society.

  2. DUH! Humans are social creatures. Remove social interactions in the most critical formative time of life; remove facial expressions from interactions that do occur (masking), and you end up with greatly damaged people. Can you say Frederick’s Experiment? Some of us said this from the beginning but we were ridiculed by progressives here. And the children suffer. But that doesn’t matter to progressives so long as the beast is happy.

  3. Isolation. This “experiment” was done in WW2 with babies in Germany and Romania. Many babies in baby nurseries – all cared for with basic needs – changing, food, etc. Just minimal picking up. Not much human interaction with adults or babies. In one year 75% of the babies were dead.
    We should not be surprised this IQ drop is happening. Take away the human face and isolate. Soon, we’ll believe anything to get some kind of affirmation, even as adults. It’s becoming obvious, even to the “I never met a regulation I didn’t like” crowd, that this charade doesn’t put our health at the top of the list. It’s on the list. But it’s not so near the top as they tell us it is.
    What is at the top? I don’t know that yet. But at least we don’t have to fool ourselves anymore that it’s to keep us healthy.

  4. This should come as no surprise as the people pushing the lockdowns and mask mandates all have significantly lower IQs as well..

      • With his own IQ hovering far below room temperature, I guess you could say Joe Biden is a pandemic baby.

        • A society so eager to harm its own children and grandchildren so they can feel safer is a truly despicable society.

    • Pandemic babies also run around screaming with their hair on fire, demanding mask mandates, forced injections of experimental gene therapies, economy and soul-destroying lockdowns, and the virtually complete and permanent suspension of basic rights, all because of a disease with (at most) a 0.2% fatality rate.
      .
      No, on second thought, not even babies are that stupid, and that evil.

  5. I wonder if there was any change to Christ believer parents babies, especially if parent(s) attended church where people didnt have to wear masks, and close believer church family and friends still kept their interactions between one another despite the risks if parents needed help. I notice the babies in church, their facial responses don’t look any different than another baby I seen earlier in spring-summer where the new mother, grandmother, and father were clearly limiting their newborn’s interactions. Their baby looked like he had delayed eye and facial responses than the babies I met in church.

  6. Not surprising, during the pandemic I would see my two young neighbor boys. They would be sitting outside with nothing to do, no one they could interact and play with. Not to mention computerized school with reduced hours. I would ask myself, what is the cost of this? We’ll be finding out. It was nice to see yesterday groups of kids walking home, laughing, having fun. Masks came off as soon as they left school, there is a bright spot.

    • Kids have forgotten how to play. If they don’t have some sort of electronic device they quickly get bored. We used to make our own fun. Go down to the creek and play, climb a tree throw a ball. Times change and so have kids unfortunately.

      • And too many adults have forgotten how to think for themselves, preferring instead to lazily, gullibly and mindlessly absorb and believe all the self-serving and malevolent propaganda spewed by the political establishment and their corporate media handmaidens.

        • Too many parents have spared the rod and spoiled the child. Trolls nowadays don’t know the meaning of the word no because it was never told to them as they threw a kick and screaming fit in the check out aisle in Walmart. They quickly learned that this behavior rewards them a candy bar didn’t you?

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