I think I say this every time I see a headline like this on HN, but I'll say it again: The past decade of social science research publication has proven that provocative-sounding results should be considered fraudulent until the underlying data has been published, and then (assuming the data passes muster) should be regarded with skepticism until independently replicated with a fresh data set.
One of the most eye-opening studies I saw was that social science papers with the most citations, had the highest likelihood of not being reproducible. Meaning that Social Sciences are actually pushing out misinformation more than not.
"A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks." -- Paul Graham.
No, a moderately successful paper has 1-10 k citations, and usually 0-1 reproductions. Extremely successful papers have 10-40 k citations and 1-3 reproductions. They largely dont matter at all.
Its mostly because extraordinary claims receive more attention, and thus is found by the group for whom the result supported their prior beliefs. They will use it whenever they need to support such.
This is also why such studies tend to keep getting cited as evidence long after a long line of failures to replicate have been published. As the result is non-replicable, there also wont be a newer, improved version of the publication, meaning all cites go to the original.
The theory is that there is a pressure in certain academic fields to reinforce existing popular narratives with new publications, motivating researchers to confirm them, and thus for other researchers to cite them. ...but since such efforts attract low-quality researchers and are based on an implicit initial bias, due to its self-referential nature, that the results are not reproducible by others in the future since teams that try to reproduce results are usually more neutral on the topics.
That doesn't technically mean misinformation although but it does imply major room for improvement in methodology. If I roll a d20 and get a 7 and you roll it and get 13 that doesn't make the prior study inaccurate. The sizes are too low or not properly defined.
But the combination of publish-or-perish and grant seeking pushing sensationalism isn't good for honesty let alone accuracy or precision.
But it seems very appropriate that you quote one statistic and then make a claim about a completely different one. Good exercise/example for the reader.
Well the fact they need to advocate for separation is proof of unity by default at least. It is united as government organizations, not united as a hivemind.
Unity failing under the previous is say, Birmingham besieging London. The latter never happened.
Social "scientists" and journalists are alike in that both seek to mislead using misleading and often madeup Statistics. The world would be much better off without either one.
Does epidemiology have a well-publicized replication crisis with numerous examples of outright fraud from high-profile researchers? If so then yes. If not then why don’t you just say what you’re trying to say rather than imply it obliquely in the form of a question?
My “argument,” which is really more of an observation since we’re not debating anything, is clear. Epidemiology, as a social science, should not escape the same skepticism we approach the other social sciences with.
Perhaps my comment is slightly off-topic, but I just like to leave a friendly reminder since I don’t find epidemiological conclusions under enough scrutiny in public fora these days.
Would love to see the raw data, but from their own plots you can see that 2017, 2018 and 2019 show a trend that would make the 2020 and 2021 data consistent with the trend.
As they show data comparing 2020 and 2021 to the previous years, they could have shown a matrix to compare year over year across the data.
I will wait for someone to look at the raw data and peer review the paper before jumping to conclusions.
I'm not discounting that the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on child development, I would be surprised if it didn't, but I expected a bit more rigorous data analysis from this paper.
Edit: was intended as response to a reply to this.
Appreciate the caution.
We took a different approach.
Unlimited screen time.
Our daughter’s rate of learning is incredible.
She willingly explores IRL play. No battles when we ask her to put down her iPad.
Roblox and Minecraft are our shared playtime.
I was homeschooled with no TV. My experience of her development is similar to what I experienced with my siblings.
A healthy dose of skepticism is warranted when new tech is the explanation for diminishing returns in our existing systems. Children are in aggressively structured, impoverished educational systems nationwide - bankrupt in both their pedagogy and their budgets. Teachers & administrators have raised the warning that as many as 80% of children have not engaged at all with their schooling in the past two years.
Maybe iPads aren’t the problem.
Maybe they are one reason cognitive decline in children isn’t dramatically worse.
> bankrupt in both their pedagogy and their budgets
The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets.
The main budgetary problem is bureaucratic. The schools get more than enough money, but the teachers aren't the ones who decide how to spend it, so a teacher who wants more school supplies than are allocated has to pay out of pocket and then we get these anecdotes.
The solution is a combination of two things. First, stop trying to regulate education from the top. Let the individual teachers do it. Provide resources, don't enforce conformity. Second, let the parents choose the teachers, or more realistically, the school. Then you get competition between schools to provide the best education instead of the existing system of like it or lump it. Also, give the same money to the parents who are homeschooling. Homeschool is school and the families doing it shouldn't be financially penalized for choosing something that by most accounts gives better results.
> The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets.
Educational spending covers a different set of domains in the US than it does in other countries. There's a lot of backfill in the social services area, for example.
That doesn't mean schools are under-funded. If it's true it implies schools are over-funded and some of their budgets should be transferred to social services.
Then what's your benchmark for "underfunded"? How are we to determine whether we're getting value for our investment, or whether it's something other than funding that's handicapping the outcomes?
A really easy benchmark would be to check whether funding pays for basic classroom supplies (tissues, chalk, paper for assignments, etc.), or if teachers commonly pay for that stuff out-of-pocket. In the US the latter is common.
Read the thread, this is not a problem of funding but allocation of funds. I know schools that can't find $50 for supplies still find $80,000 each for 3 assistant principals who don't do any work, even in theory.
The US has a worst of both worlds garbage system. In theory there is local control, where "local" often means at the state level and "state" is generally a thing with a GDP larger than the median country.
Then on top of that the federal Department of Education sucks billions of dollars in tax revenue out of everywhere and sends it back with strings attached. This isn't even a majority of the budgets, but it's enough that it hurts to turn the money away, and so you get all the strings.
Whereas actual "local control" would be at the level of an individual school or classroom.
The U.S. asks the schools (and prisons) to deal with all societal ills. Many country filter their non-university bound population prior, and this saves a lot of wasted cost.
The idea that poor parents don’t care about their kids’ success enough to want to choose what they perceive to be better schools is belied by the lengthy waiting lists for slots in charter or magnet schools and voucher programs.
What we have now is a market-based approach, where the price of admission to a top flight public school system is a $1M mortgage.
Being poor doesn't necessarily mean you care less, but it can mean you have less time, resources and mobility to out towards finding a better school and having your child go to a better school, especially if it's not as close.
What we have now is a system where we for the most part try to remove market influences so wealth doesn't advantage/disadvantage children, but with the constant thorn of wealthier parents constantly fighting to have their resources applied to their own children, sometimes without considering what that means overall.
If we could actually separate wealth from public education, maybe we'd actually see some change.
One interesting way might be to allow free bussing up to 10 (or more?) miles for any child, and allow parents to choose whatever school they want. Those wealthier schools in nicer areas will have to start splitting those funds between more and more students. Of course this would never be allowed for long.
> Being poor doesn't necessarily mean you care less, but it can mean you have less time, resources and mobility to out towards finding a better school and having your child go to a better school, especially if it's not as close.
Knowing which school is the good school is hardly the problem. It's the one in the good neighborhood where the poor kids can't afford to live. The problem with the status quo is that knowing that doesn't get you into the school, only money does.
> If we could actually separate wealth from public education, maybe we'd actually see some change.
This is the idea of school choice. You give every kid in the state the same amount of money for school and don't gate admission by street address and the poor kid at least has a chance to go to the better school.
You would then end up with admissions criteria like test scores for the better schools, which would have some disparity in them, but how is that worse than the status quo of every rich kid going to the good school and every poor kid going to the bad school? At least there would be a path for getting out of the hole based on something other than having your parents make more money and buy a very expensive house.
And then you can work on improving admissions criteria so that promising students with low income parents get to go to better schools. Or better yet, start your own good school that does exactly this without needing permission from the parents of dumb rich kids who want your slot.
> Knowing which school is the good school is hardly the problem. It's the one in the good neighborhood where the poor kids can't afford to live.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Not only are poorer people less likely to have the time in the morning to get their children to schools farther away, they're also less likely to even have vehicles to do some in some cases.
That's why maybe opening up schools to any student, ignoring criteria such as geography or testing, and providing free bussing to a certain range/degree might be a market approach way to allow those resources to be more evenly spread across children (if the poorer schools have 25% less children each but the richer schools have 50% more children, that might even out some of the funding issues and allow for other reform to take place, such as not using property taxes).
Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities.
As for testing to get into wealthier schools, to some degree that might be a chicken and egg problem. What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another? You could heavily regulate the testing, but I think heavy regulation often leads to people finding and abusing the loopholes. I think I favor lighter regulation (but not the lack of any, for sure), and incentives and disincentives towards desired behavior what are viewed less as a sacrosanct set of rules that must be preserved and more as an ever changing set of nudges to move us towards the outcomes we want.
> Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities.
There is no reason to do this if you have reasonable selection criteria. Right now we're trying to maintain the facade that all public schools accept everyone while not actually doing that in practice. Make the acceptance criteria explicit and you don't need the implicit gating by income.
> What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another?
This is solved by allowing each school to have their own criteria.
The thing parents want isn't actually to put all the rich kids together. It's to put their kid together with the creative kids and not the destructive kids. That might correlate somewhat with rich kids and poor kids, but it's not the same thing. Then schools that do a better job of selecting for what parents really want will be more attractive to all parents than the ones using cheap heuristics like parental income. And then the creative poor kids get to go to the good school.
It also allows schools to specialize. You've got some kids who are in gangs. How about a boarding school which is 20 miles outside the city. The kid stays there all week and only comes home on weekends. A place where the bad kids can turn themselves around, where you remove the kid from existing bad influences for the school week. We already have private schools like that, but the poor families who need them the most can only send their kids to the drug-infested prison-school allocated to the neighborhood they can afford to live in.
The root cause is that you have more or less four choices
* private, which is expensive (and in some cases not a guarantee of quality)
* rich public, which requires probably living in the extremely local school district
* magnet/charter, which usually have whole apparatuses dedicated to securing donor funding similar to how colleges ask former alumni and the wealthy to top up their budgets
* poor public
At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts, but that's kind of hard because a lot of the separate school districts were intentionally set up that way to ensure that socioeconomic classes did not have to share schools in a post-segregation world. Even if you did manage to do it, a lot of people would probably pull out and choose private instead.
> At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts
Large school districts seem to attract their own special blend of problems.
> But it is absolutely insane that in some states "boundary-hopping" school districts can send parents who want the best for their child to jail.
Sounds like fraud, which is generally a jailable offense. Specific details would matter, but what would you expect to happen if you registered to vote with an improper address so you could vote in a different district for some reason? I'd expect some chance of jail.
The existing system is the inverse of what we need.
Right now you have good schools and bad schools and the way to get into the good schools is to have money and pay a lot for a house. The cost is more not because the good school actually costs more to operate, but because "having money" is being used as the admissions criteria, as a heuristic for not being a destructive influence.
It's pretending that public schools don't have any admissions criteria and then having one anyway. But because it's only that one, the market is broken. Dumb rich kids go to the good school and smart poor kids go to the bad school.
We could do the opposite. Give everyone a fixed amount of money for school, untethering the choice of school from your income, and then use anything else as the admissions criteria. Let the school choose its own. The schools with better-than-cheap-heuristic admissions criteria will be the most desirable, but will also accept desirable classmates regardless of parental income, because that's part of what makes it a desirable school.
supportive parents are the key to success, rich, poor, black, white, asian, Hispanic, gay, strait, etc.
children with rich parents may have more doors opened, and access to things, but proclaim wealth is the only factor or even the biggest factor is false.
unsupported rich parents turn out children that fail all the time, and supportive poor parents turn out children that go on to success.
A support system at home is the biggest determinate for success or failure in life.
>The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries
Correct. New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US (<https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...>). Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.
>in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets.
Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives. (<https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...>) Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.
Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.
No. The problem with the US is that private schools exist. Once you separate kids in to private and public there is no will to improve public schooling.
“I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!”
That is fascinating and surprising; I previously considered a Darmok-like language to be implausible, but it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re experiencing.
(Edit: my inner cynic just popped up the question “are you sure she’s not just being a stereotypical teenager?” even though you didn’t mention her age).
She’s 10, not a teenager. And I meant “cultural vocabulary.” It’s difficult for her to talk about anything but memes.
And if you haven’t seen the same memes she has, she’ll try to tell you about the YouTube videos she’s watched. If you don’t find this interesting (nobody does), she’ll stop talking to you.
Most people have access to alcohol and do not drink all day. Among those that do drink all day, it's common to use alcohol to self-medicate for various mental issues like depression and anxiety. Removing the alcohol will not fix the underlying problem and may simply result in a different choice of self-medication.
Since going [near] unlimited screen time we have seen a huge change in how our son (8yo) engages with the iPad and computer which has resulted in a much happier and healthier use of technology.
As soon as the iPad/computer was no longer "special" due to time limitations it sort of lost its "power" over him. He was much more open to using it for things other than games and funny videos.
I felt a bit dumb when I realised it was me putting these limits on his use of the iPad and computer that amplified how much "power" they had over his desire to use them.
Obviously there are still some limits but we follow them for ourselves as well (such as no screen time before bed, taking breaks every hour) so they haven't been an issue.
I certainly don't think the devices are the problem but more how we give these devices so much power over kids by holding this magical machine in front of them that can do so damn much then restrict access to them so all they ever want to do is very basic things like game.
> As soon as the iPad/computer was no longer "special" due to time limitations it sort of lost its "power" over him.
Back in 9th grade when I was 14 or 15, we had a substitute teacher who was just out of college and our regular teacher hadn't prepared any sort of lesson plan for her, so instead of doing what we were supposed to we somehow got into a long conversation about adulthood.
The part that's always stuck with me is when one of the other students asked something like, "now that it's legal you must get drunk all the time, right?", and she described the same thing you did here about screens: All the allure was from it being forbidden, and once she was legally allowed to drink she just didn't care anymore.
In a way it sounds like a naive question but some percent of people will get drunk all the time because it is available, or over use games/devices to the detriment of everything else in their lives. I think in the end all parents can really do is try model a more balanced, well rounded life and hope their kids want that for themselves.
Minecraft and Roblox are active, creative pursuits, and demand disciplined, logical thinking to achieve goals. Lincoln Logs and Erector Sets for the digital age.
TV demands precisely the opposite. Kids are psychologically rewarded for passive non-thinking. They feel the win when their screen hero beats the villain, even though all they did was just... sit there and consume.
The modern equivalents -- TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, basically any streaming video service -- crank that badness up to about 162, because at least the television programming of yore was finite. You could only watch cartoons and be bombarded with ads for maybe two hours at a time before something more boring and adult came on.
Moreover, parents also knew what their kids were watching, because the TV was in the living room. Nowadays, with personal digital devices, none of that holds.
My family treats smartphones the same way we treat guns: both are powerful and dangerous tools.
I could make a pretty strong case that an iPhone is more dangerous to a toddler than an AR-15.
At the same time, you can't hide your kids from the world and expect them to be able to deal with it. Parents must take responsibility and educate relentlessly. You might start with "don't touch, find an adult", but you're going to finish by teaching your kids to master their tools.
> You could only watch cartoons and be bombarded with ads for maybe two hours at a time before something more boring and adult came on.
That was true at one point, but it is worth noting that Cartoon Network is about 30 years old now. And even before cable became the dominant TV delivery mechanism, VHS enabled lots of binge watching (and rewatching).
We also have a unlimited screen time policy with our kids
It’s been nothing but great!
They turned into information sponges with a huge amount of knowledge about the world, way ahead of their peers.
Our son watches a lot of extrem sports YouTube content which always inspires him to push harder to get better at those sports himself.
He is the only one in his class who will tackle the large half pipes at the local dirt park for example. It’s the result of watching the pro’s do it on YouTube and then practicing relentlessly!
Society has this thing where everything new is stamped as bad…book, bad! Bicycles, bad! Radio, bad!, TV, bad! Computer games, bad! Drugs, bad! Sugar, bad! People are just a bunch of scaredy cats
We ought to provide kids some more nuance about the things in the world
Is there bad things to watch or do on your screens, like scary stuff or things that are incredibly dull…absolutely. But the only way to learn what that is, is to let them experience it and learn.
Cool, but what if your son stops watching interesting YT videos and starts playing Fortnite 10 hours a day?
And: How old is your son and at what age did you start the unlimited screen time policy?
Because as you say, there is more nuance to screen time. It depends on the kid’s personality, the age, the environment, friends, access to outdoor activities etc.
> Cool, but what if your son stops watching interesting YT videos and starts playing Fortnite 10 hours a day?
Then something else is wrong. That's not a normal behavior that healthy people do, it's a symptom of some other problem in their life.
Thanks to the pandemic, my son has learned that screens can be boring, and it's not all that exciting anymore after too much time. He's learned to put it down and find something else to do. We don't have to enforce screen time anymore, he mostly does it himself.
> Then something else is wrong. That's not a normal behavior that healthy people do, it's a symptom of some other problem in their life.
Not really... games are designed to be incredibly addictive, can be social activities and have much lower physical consequences/withdrawals from misuse. Don't find Rat-Park as a convincing explanation for why high schools boys might prefer Fortnite to Zoom Class.
"Bicycles bad"? I don't think anyone has said that since Victorian times. Probably not then either.
If your son hadn't been into BMX/MTB/Cross (are you sure you mean halfpipe?) before the unlimited screen time policy, don't you think he might have ended up obsessed with computer games or youtube instead?
We have never had a screen time policy. I was always unlimited. He also watches a bunch of dumb crab on YouTube…but hey, I enjoy my stupid TikTok memes too…so why wouldn’t I let him.
I make fun of him when I think he does something stupid…but it’s in good spirit. My job as a parent is not to manipulate him into the life I think he should live…my job is to enable him to live his!
And Yes, our 5y old takes a full size dirt park half pipe…has done so ever since he has been 3y or so. I wouldn’t do that myself…but he does
He also is into skateboards, snowboards, plays basketball, soccer and what not. He got me into skateboarding at 40…don’t worry though, I wear a helmet :)
In this moment I am watching him race an RC car with 30-40mph across a meadow
Earlier today he was had. oculus headset strapped on and was playing job simulator
How do you ride a dirt bike in a half pipe? I think you're mixing up terminology here. And he must be very big for his age if he can ride a full-size dirt bike.
> My job as a parent is not to manipulate him into the life I think he should live
That happens to be exactly what your job is. Children don't know what's best for them, that's why they have parents.
So what does he take to the "dirt park half pipe", and what is that? I've never seen a half pipe in a dirt park, do you ride it like a snowboard half pipe or a skate ramp?
Unlimited meaning whatever I could find in the house
My wife on the other side grew up not having unlimited access to candy
Guess who of the two of us as adult now can control their candy consumption and who if there is candy in the house will eat every last bit of it with 2/3 days?
Forced limiting of anything won’t teach a person how to deal with it…quite the opposite
Same with my household (at least with snacks and treats). I remember being baffled when friends would come over and gorge themselves on all the snacks at my house. Then I realized it was because they considered these things a limited resource.
To this day a quart of ice cream can last me weeks even when it’s the only treat in the house. But then my wife joins the fray and suddenly it’s like a competition to finish it in one night.
I have a friend who was always the best in his class at Uni and has become a lead doctor in a major hospital. He once told me that he used to watch roughly 2-3 hrs of television on any day when he was a kid because his parents needed to work all the time. He turned out just fine.
I remember back in the day television was the bad guy in town. I wonder if iPads aren’t much better since they foster interaction and not just dull watching.
Or maybe you suffer from survivorship bias. I mean, anecdotes are nice and all, but totally useless in determining whether unlimited screen time has negative effects or not.
> he used to watch roughly 2-3 hrs of television on any day
Surprising comment, that this is seen is unusual! I grew up in the 70s-80s (in Australia). 2-3 hours would've been pretty much universal, I think, and more likely to be >3 than <2. And half or more of it really, really bad. I've never admitted to anyone some of those deeply crappy US series from the 80s I watched, and am not starting now! Yeah, I turned out fine.. but all those hours watching crap. The movies/series had ads in them too, a lot of them.
I've been trying to make up for that, by watching just good/great stuff from around the world, no ads, during the last 10 years: see http://www.adamponting.com/movies/
Please define what you mean by "just fine". "Just fine" is what parents who abused their kids say. Those kids later go to therapy to understand their treatment was abusive and to deal with it, and they don't turn out just fine, they turn out traumatized. I really have no idea what the situation is, but "they turned out just fine" is to abused kids the same as saying the phrase "calm down" in a heightened situation doesn't do shit to calm the situation down.
Just fine this is the assessment of the previous poster, not that of his friend's parents.
You can't devalue that just because abusive parents use similar words.
And I doubt that abusive parents have a unique wording so you can't infer abuse from certain phrases.
That's one impressive extrapolation from an anecdote. I won't point at the significant amount of research that disagrees (since that would be ironic considering the parent of this thread) but instead I'll point to the anecdotes of children I know whose iPads and screen time are the source of significant problems. Sounds like your daughter is great and that you are an involved parent
The most notable difference between TV and computers of various sizes is it's interactive vs. passive, so the "reducing screen time" needs more nuance to the discussion - likewise Roblox etc together as a family sounds lovely vs. isolated dopamine hits from Instagram potentially allowing your peers/strangers dictate how you should feel about yourself (wrongly in either direction).
This reminds me of all the screen time I had as a kid with my parents, taking turns on single player games (a life or a race). A lot of time spent thinking about how the next turn would go, who would be better at this level (my mom was great at some Zelda temples and I was better at others). Way more thinking happened than any other TV activity.
My father mentioned he noticed that when I played video games with my peers as a child, it was very much a social activity. I think it somewhat changed his paradigm on the medium after the 1990s having a bit of a moral panic on the topic.
Personally I wonder whether there's a big difference between playing YouTube stimulation videos vs logic puzzle/math/mystery games vs the latest dopamine-addiction-of-day game
I think so. We don't have tablets, but we let our daughter play plenty of videogames. There is no hard limit, the limit is when we notice herself "coasting" instead of playing, but in those cases it means she's bored,so she happily explores alternatives.
Playing an engaging videogame has the result of her deeply describing what she is doing (yes it's very annoying to the parent that has to acknowledge every detail, but it's a price I'm very happy to pay), as well as stimulating her duplo-building skills ("I've built a level for Yoshi!")
A relative of mine works in NYC schools and routinely notes that whenever he subs in a poorer district the teaching strategy basically revolves around making students sit and behave so they'll learn how to be obedient unskilled labor when they grow up. They told a six or seven year old girl that she wasn't allowed to cry when she missed her parents and toys.
> They told a six or seven year old girl that she wasn't allowed to cry when she missed her parents and toys.
Oof. A teachable moment for the instructors hopefully becomes one for the student. Good teachers are amazing; bad ones are horrible at both teaching and learning from their students.
Looking at the paper, the statistical story is a bit complicated.
In figure 2, the authors argue that there is a trend. But the graph seems to show the direct measurements of dependent variables with confidence intervals, and they are all non-significant. This means that there is no reason to talk about a trend, especially if the difference between significant and non-significant is not significant :)
[edit]: Would really have loved if they showed marginal effects here, removing the influence of control variables.
But the models themselves do something else: Table 3 suggests that covid was used as a binary variable to test for. So they are comparing pre-covid to covid-time and see a significant result there.
Methodologically, it doesn't seem like a bad design, but the sample size is really a bit small to have sufficient power.
Apart from that, the effect size of covid (31) seems really high, but developmental psychology is not my field so I can't say anything about that.
> In figure 2, the authors argue that there is a trend. But the graph seems to show the direct measurements of dependent variables with confidence intervals, and they are all non-significant.
From the Figure 2 caption, I'm pretty sure it's showing standard deviations (of the sample) not 95% confidence intervals (of the mean). Two samples may have overlapping ± 1 s.d. intervals despite having significant different means.
Thanks for catching this, that's even more straight-forward (and arguably less informative, but the best solution would be to have both plots of raw data and marginal effects of course).
I would bet on the growth of notepads and smartphone usage by children 0-2 age. There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents.
Click on some YTube show and baby won’t bother you for the next hour or two.
That is both name-calling and flamebait, and therefore breaks the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Can you please make your substantive points without doing that? Note this guideline also:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Parenting is one of the most emotionally activating topics that exists, and therefore one of the most divisive.
I am a parent myself and I know very good the cost of it, and yes - I think if you enable cartoons on YouTube for your few months old kid - that’s the laziness. You always can find a way to attract and engage your baby without electronics.
A coworker of mine had every intention of not having any screentime for their toddler. But lockdown meant two parents working from home + no daycare. The solutions were either one of them quits their job or they buy an iPad. Economy necessity dictated the latter.
With my toddler, we retained zero screentime simply because my wife is freelance and can get away with ~10 hours of actual work per week.
The entire point of this sub-thread was to analyze the trend pre-lockdown. (FWIW, I'm then not wanting to comment on whether this is lazy behavior or not, but just that this defense is out of place.)
I had same intention. Even practically largely managed. And then, when I shown toddler first fairy tale, toddler started to have way more varied and imaginative games.
Turns out, it does not destroys them at all. It can actually add quite a lot.
The harm can happen if you overdo it a lot. But some watching or playing is not destroying them at all.
no chance this guy has kids. ppl said this same thing about television. if you read newspaper clippings from the early 20th century you can find letters to the editor about parents concerned their kids read too many books
And I think it is a valid concern even today. It’s not that there’s anything inherently bad or dangerous with books, videos or computer games. But too much of anything steal time that is needed for other parts of a well rounded upbringing. If you spend too much time in front of a screen or books, you won’t spend enough time being outdoors and being physically active, or being with friends practicing social skills and conflict resolution. And the opposite is of course also true: if you spend all days doing sports or just hanging out with friends, there won’t be enough time for reading or other types of experiences.
Some behaviours are more immediately rewarding than other. It’s rare to find anyone eating too much broccoli or having problems stop rehearsing German irregular verbs.
But surprise for you — I have. And I know that it is more than possible to develop your young ones without engaging them to electronics until they reach at least 2 years old.
> There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents.
I know this is a poor form but fuck you. We work our asses off to give our kids what is generally accepted as a “good” upbringing and it’s hard. Hard during any normal period of time and even harder when dealing the pressures of the pandemic’s affect on work, day care, extracurricular activities, etc.
Happy to read whatever evidence you have on this topic. I’m keenly interested and sure as shit not “lazy” for allowing our children time to play age appropriate games on a tablet.
Would that affect lower socioeconomic status more? Could go either way. I would guess it's an observer/awareness/diagnosis effect. (Lower SE getting progressively more access to child cognitive monitoring; consistent with more attention during covid)
That seems methodologically quite questionable for the conclusions drawn. Like many blind semantic analysis attempts which consider language of a crash report for bug testing toxic due to the instances of "does not work", and "kill" and "fail". Meanwhile "I hope you enjoy eating your family then." is positive.
Falsely presenting subjective viewpoints as objective would appear more rational. It isn't the trappings which make it rational or even distance from emotions. One can rationally make "non-optimal" decisions from subjective personal costs.
Antivaxxers tend to use scientific/rational language though, as opposed to new age vibes or what they heard from their priests. They’re using a modernist mindset, they just happen to be wrong.
I doubt that, most of them just copy & paste parts from studies or headlines shared in social networks
One of my latest memories is the introduction of a test that can be used to test for Corona and flu at the same time. The relevant article headline spoke of a test to distinguish flu from Corona.
This then turned into the antivaxxers saying that previous PCR tests could not distinguish corona from flu.
"They’re using a modernist mindset, they just happen to be wrong."
They are certainly not using a scientific mindset - they are just using language that sounds scientific, so it sounds smart and solid.
But is not, when you look closer and try to find their data and sources. But common people does not do that - and fall for it.
It is basically fraud, in most instances.
Would be curious to see data on this. I most frequently see an emotional appeal against authority, vague anxieties and fears and/or slippery slope arguments.
Use of rational language does not mean that the conclusion is reasonable, nor free of fallacy. For example, people saying the covid shot interferes with long term immunity is rational and modern, just not based in fact (or misapplying fact).
There are mechanisms that could cause that (“original antigenic sin”) and it does happen with dengue fever. Of course, it’s not true here, but it was reasonable to think it might be in 2020.
And covid vaccines being spike-only may be less effective against variants than whole-virus vaccines or actual infections. But flu shots manage to be ineffective a year later with whole viruses in them, so maybe that wouldn’t help.
Antivax is literally as old as vaccines are. There’s an enormous Victorian corpus of antivax literature, complete with crazy claims that vaccines were causing leprosy. In this respect, nothing has changed.
Nor does it evince the collapse of rational thinking. If people just suspended their critical judgement and did whatever they were told unquestioningly, there would also be no antivax movement, but their compliance would not speak to their capacity for rationality, only their bovinity.
Funny enough I expect Venn diagram of antivaxers and people who don't let their kid use screens to have a significant overlap. Sometimes raw distrust is justified.
This post is so typical of all scientific posts to HN.
Person posts negatively to the research and they never look at p valued or sample sizes. Also, they disregard any other possible research .
Then a few to a hundred posts refuting the parent with anecdotal evidence of both positive and negative outcomes especially when science doesn’t work in anecdotal evidence which is the point of science and it basically shows that they didn’t read the story either.
The big problem is that science isn’t one sided. That papers are cherry picked from preprints or even Confrence and journals where one out of ten papers in a Confrence or a journal publication refute the article regardless.
I wish the "Methods" section got a bit more info the assessments themselves.
These kids are a maximum of two years old. It's not like they're sitting down with math worksheets. From my (limited) understanding, most cognitive assessments in children that age have to do with responsiveness to stimuli.
It would help to know what they're testing specifically, and if it could be something extremely specific to the test that's being impacted by common covid practices, rather than the child's cognitive development as a whole.
"In this work, therefore, we specifically sought to explore individual and population-level trends in infant
and early child neurodevelopment. Analyses of cognitive development, assessed using Mullen Scales
of Early Learning [40], a population normed and clinically administered tool that assesses function
across the five primary domains of fine and gross motor control, visual reception, and expressive and
respective language via direct observation and performance, provides some of the first direct evidence
of the developmental impact of the COVID-19 pandemic."
"The Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) is a standardized assessment that is commonly used in clinical psychology as a developmental measure of cognitive development (Mullen, 1989, 1995). The MSEL is organized into 5 subscales: (a) gross motor, (b) fine motor, (c) visual reception (or non-verbal problem solving), (d) receptive language, and (e) expressive language. An early learning composite score can be derived from fine motor, visual reception, receptive language, and expressive language scales. For young children this early learning composite score is considered equivalent to a more traditional “IQ” score or a developmental standard score." (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/mullen-scale...)
It's small wonder <2yo children born into this atmosphere would have underdeveloped receptive and expressive language skills.
I doubt this will prove an accurate measurement of their general cognitive development over time. Once the children are exposed to unmasked people with the frequency that used to be considered normal, their skills in that area will probably catch up...assuming what was previously considered "normal" ever does return.
I would be interested too if those tests were performed with facemasks for the investigators or maybe fully remote. They mostly seem to focus on the modelling and not how they gathered the data pre/during pandemic.
The effects of the 1918 influenza epidemic were large and persisted for decades, as well. Marginal Revolution has a good summary[1]. Fetal exposure seems to have been a major factor[2], money quote here: Fetal health is found to affect nearly every socioeconomic outcome recorded in the 1960, 1970, and 1980 Censuses. Men and women show large and discontinuous reductions in educational attainment if they had been in utero during the pandemic. The children of infected mothers were up to 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school. Wages of men were 5–9 percent lower because of infection. Socioeconomic status…was substantially reduced, and the likelihood of being poor rose as much as 15 percent compared with other cohorts. Public entitlement spending was also increased.
My own daughter was born in late Jan 2020 so I think we dodged the fetal exposure issue but perhaps socialization impacts may be substantial (although at her age, her peers do not wear masks and some daycare providers have worn clear spit shields rather than masks; nonetheless I think she has socialized less than she would have a few years previously, but more than kids who don't go to daycare).
But infants aren't really susceptible to covid (not sure if they get it less frequently or not, but they very rarely develop strong symptoms). This is in contrast to flu which strongly affects children, so I'm not sure that exposure in utero would have as strong an effect as in 1918. But maybe sick mothers are have an impact on the fetus.
> The children of infected mothers were up to 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school. Wages of men were 5–9 percent lower because of infection.
It is probably hard to control for "being poor", since it correlates with both lesser pay and education and I guess getting sick.
I don't have time to look into methodology in great detail, but their model seems to be flawed?
CDQ is designed to correlate with age[1] and it's expected that the most recently born children have lower scores. Just treating age as a model covariate seems wrong? Shouldn't they do some kind of propensity score matching (match equally old childs with comparable maternal education, weight, etc.)? instead?
I also really doubt that a verbal development assessment already makes sense for children born after March 2020 (or you would have to limit the sample to children born in March/April 2020 and assessed just now)?
Would be nice if someone who is more experienced with this data + methodology can comment on that...
How the toddlers of today growing up with fully masked teachers during their institutionalized education will manage to develop normal social skills without being able to see people’s faces is beyond me.
I was blind until I was 4 and while I have some neurological visual issues, my social skills are fine even though I couldn't see facial expressions at that age. Not saying it didn't have an impact, but it's probably not that serious.
Our (Bay Area, CA) school district psychologist told us - “Most of our 4 and 5 years old are behind 1 to 2 year on their language and social development”.
How this is not national news 24/7? It is a disaster.
So much about protecting the children…
At least for covid, this has never been about protecting the children, mostly about protecting old people. I remember a classmate calling it "sacrificing the mental health of the youth for the physical health of the old".
I don't think that "lots" is true, at least in proportion. You can see that there are very big differences of death by covid depending on the age of the patients: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi.... Maybe we don't have the same definition of "children" and "old". My point is that people under 30 years paid a great price to protect mostly the health of people over 60 years old.
I'll add a point that might sound very bad, but I think it has to be taken into account. In the country where I live, France, people between ~20 and ~60 years old pay for the healthcare and retirement of mostly everyone else. That means that if someone was 22 at the start of covid, and in their last 2 years of studies, they had a hard time to protect people 60+ years old. Then, for the next 20 years, they're going to pay the healthcare and the retirement of those people. Considering that the fertility is getting lower and lower in France, I think this is a very dangerous strategy for the long-term stability of public expanses.
We are in a democracy, and we didn't get any choice in how covid was handled. In France the mean age is 42 years old, the median age is 41 years old [1]. The mean age in the Assemblée Nationale is 51 years old [2]. It's also the mean age of the current governement [3]. The mean age of mayors is 58 years old [4]. All of that makes me think that there might be a bias to protect older people, and that some of the decision taken came from that.
I imagine children's physical health is actually being severely affected as well, especially for children in lower income families.
I would expect less physical movement overall (bad), more respiratory issues from over-wearing masks, anxiety manifesting as physical issues, and a host of other second order effects.
And let's not forget that poorer kids worldwide are facing less access to dentists and other preventative medicine overall. That people are letting this stuff slide while 'health' companies post record profits is maddening.
I often run (maskless of course) on the street where I can see public’s school stadium. Kids there wear masks outside while running around stadium during PE class. What kind of insanity is this??! This is in Santa Clara county, CA.
good try. But Santa Clara county isn’t exactly a cold place, and they do it when it is +30C. I know parents whose kid actually fainted during PE outside.
Actually, toddlers will all have great super social skills, because they will not believe that "smiling = you're happy", which is totally wrong. They'll need to figure out emotions using tone of voice and the look of the person's eyes and maybe upper cheeks.
So I disagree with your point entirely. And I've provided even more reasoning than you did about why today's children will be even better at social conduct than their predecessors.
They will manage just fine, because they are exposed to enough maskless people at home and in other social settings. And even in schools, kids often don't follow mask mandates, especially when the teacher steps out, or sets an example by wearing a chin diaper during class.
> They will manage just fine because they are exposed to enough maskless people at home and in other social settings
The wealthy kids have that opportunity. Kids with natural social skills may be fine too.
However, kids with two parents that are working 4 jobs won't reach their full potential. Many kids already have issues from this; and it's awful that their voices and their parents voices - and their psychologists voices - aren't being heard.
Myself, I find it abhorrent that people are casually brushing aside a clear major developmental impact on an entire generation of growing children. The cost benefit ratio seems awfully bad.
Yes, times are tough for everyone, including children. I find it even more abhorrent to single out masks because "you can't see people's faces", while ignoring what their purpose is and what can they prevent. We've seen enough idiots decimate their family and friends while repeating this exact same argument.
Masks that are worse than a well-fitted N95 help with limiting spread when you go into a shop for 15 minutes. When you spend 8 hours in a crowded building with no ventilation, they do exactly nothing -- you will get full exposure regardless. Masks in schools are health theater.
Could you please stop posting flamewar comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately.
Also, it looks like your account has swerved into using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of ideology, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for. I had to go all the way back to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29190538 to see a comment that wasn't like this.
This sort of over-the-top rhetoric gives anti-maskers their ammo.
I am unaware of a single family, anywhere on the planet, that was "decimated" by Covid. I hope you really mean "devastated," because then at least you'd be making some semblance of sense.
Also, to ignore that there are studies and experts that back their opinion is a little rich. Sure, you can say you think your studies and your experts are better, but to assume those who disagree with you are "idiots" is, again, pretty over-the-top, and exactly the sort of thing someone can point to and say: "Look, these pro-maskers are projecting."
Why not try to be a little more understanding and share some of this knowledge with people? Do you really need to stoop so low?
This might sound a little callous, but I wonder if it's a long term net positive.
In the short term, it's a detriment; they will have to struggle more and will encounter more difficulties in socialization. But that's not necessarily a Unique problem, there have always been kids with these kinds of problems, if not at this rate. And on this short term we're decreasing mortality from covid and hopefully keeping hospital resources available to minimize mortality from other causes.
Over the long term, decreased mortality is generally a net societal gain. An increase of people with issues socializing will result in an increase in the market for solutions, tools, community, and support that help with this kind of problem. These solutions would help both the pandemic babies And those who would normally struggle, and would be available to future generations too!
I think the problem you're missing is that these are two different groups. Mortality is decreased, sure, and people get social problems, sure, but the people getting the increased social problems are not the ones getting the lowered mortality.
Well yeah, it's a trade off. Maybe mentioning the mortality thing distracted from my point;
The Point is that in the short term there's an increase in the number of people who have trouble socializing, but in the long term society develops better support systems and tools to help people who have trouble socializing, because there's an increased need. These tools help both people who developed problems as a result of the pandemic, And people who would Normally have problems socializing not just now but in the future as well.
The pandemic was a big hit on the development of kids who were supposed to start kindergarten but stayed at home instead. They are on average less social and verbal as a result. I hope they can recover the delay as I am the father of a 3 year old.
I bet a similar delaying effect is happening for adolescent kids who would have started being interested in the opposite sex but all they could do was Zoom into virtual lectures while being alone.
The study in this post finds that to be not true (emphasis mine):
> Overall, we find that measured verbal, non-verbal, and overall cognitive scores are significantly lower since the beginning of the pandemic. Looking further, we find that children born before the pandemic and followed through the initial stages do not show a reduction in skills or performance, but rather that young infants born since the beginning of the pandemic show significantly lower performance than in- fants born before January 2019. Thus, our results seem to suggest that early development is impaired by the environmental conditions brought on by the pandemic.
> I bet a similar delaying effect is happening for adolescent kids who would have started being interested in the opposite sex but all they could do was Zoom into virtual lectures while being alone.
So in your opinion, attending class is about finding a heterosexual romantic partner?
I know lots of teenagers had virtual lectures, but I don't know any teenagers who were 100% socially isolated from their peers for very long.
The age, not attending classes, is about having the first romantic experiences. And there were months of lock downs and almost two years of remote schooling cutting the opportunities to meet people.
... Because parents already suffering with anxiety from living through these years, need additional anxiety about the 'performance' of their children in the years coming.
Enjoy life and be gentle with each other, that's the performance that matters.
Would you prefer society just ignores this inconvenient fact?
The risk of developmental issues was obvious to many people at the beginning of the lockdowns. Now we have some data. It will help us make better decisions in the future.
Anecdotal, but I have a 5 and a 3 years old and missed nursery has been terrible for their development.
You don't even need a study for this, it's just common sense for people who have interacted with a toddler in their life before and after nursery (after 2-3 years old, I wouldn't recommend sending them before - they tend to not be ready for social life and not having one dedicated adult to them)
They didn’t test these children for antibodies. They just assume that infection is not the cause of the differences they see. And all the commenters seem to be blaming lockdowns.
> ...Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance
In the COVID-19 pandemic means we're talking about 2yr old toddlers and younger. Assessing toddler's cognitive abilities is not trivial by any means, let alone using it as a basis for far-fetched projections. So first thing that comes to mind is sampling approach.
Also a factor is a degree of social interaction, as it got harder to keep kids in peer groups esp. during the lockdowns and work from home stretches.
Either way, at this age 'performance' is almost meaningless term. There's plenty of ways and time to 'catch-up'.
You're assuming linearity, which is almost certainly not the case over the span of a human lifetime. Catching up is going to require a lot of investment from a lot of different people over a long period of time, and in many cases will probably fail, and from what the evidence in this particular study shows is that the high impact group so happens to be (predictably) those of lower SES - read that as the poor get poorer.
"...Since 2011, 1224 cognitive assessments were collected from 672 healthy, full-term, and
neurotypically-developing children between 3 months to 3 years of age. Repeated measures were
separated by at least 1 year (mean = 384 +/- 41 days). A general overview of all child assessment timings are shown in Figure 1a. This dataset included 1070 assessments (from 605 children) prior to
March 2020; 154 assessments (from 118 children) between March 2020 and June 2021; with 39 children who were born just prior to the pandemic in 2018 and 2019, and following during the pandemic to
2021..."
The cognitive assessment tool:
40. E.M., M., Mullen Scales of Early Learning. 1995, Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance
Services, Inc.
The age of the kids 'born during pandemic' in this context is up to 18months, not clear how many in count, but total is 39 born from 2018 to 2021. Pandemic start considered March 2020.
P.S. As for the Mullen Scales, citing from [1]:
"...Motivation can affect test results; therefore it is important to enhance motivation as much as possible in young children without affecting standardized procedures of the assessment (Koegel, Koegel, & Smith, 1997).
...
When young children refuse to attempt test items it can be difficult to determine their current level of functioning..."
At this point in the pandemic we've should have come up with models that factor in the externalities of lockdown and factor that into policy decisions. That somehow still hasn't happened. People say "things are pretty much back to normal" but parents with kids in school know this is not true.
Half the problem is no one has actually expressed a goal we're working towards. Covid isn't going to go away (at least not for a while), which I think everyone at least implicitly accepts at this point. The people who are going to get vaccinated largely have (especially in a few months with the OSHA rule + booster rollout). So what are we even doing?
> Half the problem is no one has actually expressed a goal we're working towards.
Yeah I don’t think the goals have been clear, even if they have been changing over time. I think the clearest goal now should be a 90% vaccination rate to turn Covid into the common cold, and then going back to life as normal, but as long as huge swathes of the population refuse to get vaccinated this goal is unattainable.
Edit: I believe Biden actually set a 70% vax goal for July 2021, and we missed it. No way we can hit 90%. I think possibly for anti-vaxers their goal is simply to not be told what to do and if they end up in an overwhelmed hospital so be it.
Looks like Portugal really turned their vaccination program around to be a real success story. As far as I can tell they are not reintroducing lockdowns?
The urge to resist force is a vital element of US culture as a check on runaway governments. You see it in many movements, on both sides for or against. Women don't want to be forced to carry a baby. LGBT community doesn't want to be forced to hide. Christians don't want to be forced to stop praying in school. Non-Christians don't want to be forced to listen to prayers in school.
Everyone should be persuaded to get vaccinated for things like flu and COVID. Very few people should be forced to do so just to keep their jobs.
The comparison of abortion with vaccination is a horrendous piece of libertarian propaganda.
No one is strapping people down and injecting them with a vaccine, it’s not a forced medical procedure. However the involvement in certain activities by the unvaccinated is limited and this is similar to many other public health orders such as not being able to smoke inside a restaurant.
Correct, nobody is strapping people down and injecting them with a vaccine. Instead, they are merely withholding your ability to purchase food and avoid repossession of your shelter if they aren't vaccinated.
There are plenty of work opportunities that don’t require vaccination, just as there is work available where you can smoke while on the job. If you choose to smoke you will find it much more difficult to work as a flight attendant than a truck driver for example.
Flight attendants can smoke off duty if they want.
There are also other ways to limit the spread of viruses apart from vaccination, like testing, distancing, masks, ventilation, etc. There should be a gradient of choice, maybe with triage nurses at the "almost definitely need to vaccinate" end, and payroll processors at the "almost definitely would be okay with regular testing and/or other standard measures" end.
The vast majority of people refusing to get vaccinated are doing so because a centralized top-down political machine told them to be against vaccination. This is about as un-libertarian as one can get.
As a libertarian that is actually concerned with freedom, the main thing the Trumpertantrum has accomplished is discrediting the concept. Back when it was a small subset of antivax nutters, causing at most an occasional localized outbreak, I had sympathy for people's right to make their own bad decisions. Now the political machine took up the banner and created a force majeure situation, so I'm just done.
Even your "good libertarian's" version of the small localized outbreak affects people that didn't make that choice.
My personal view (please don't be offended, libertarians -- it's my right to believe this!) is that individuality itself is a bit of a fiction, and this makes libertarianism essentially based on falsehood and break down. We're interconnected.
The best argument for individuality in politics and government, in my view, is that it gives "the average person" a fair shot, giving us good outcomes at the societal level even if many individuals do not get what they want.
Excessive vehemence fuels that machine, though. It's just too easy to take an authoritarian stance when we already agree with the stance and would stand to benefit, but that is counterproductive in the long run and just amplifies polarization.
In the US at least, herd immunity went away as a goal really in like May 2020. It’s always been to flatten the curve so hospitals can deal with the sick until everyone can get vaccinated. At this point, it’s just to flatten the curve so our health care system doesn’t completely implode while everyone is slowly (or not so slowly) coming in contact with the virus.
There is also international travel as a point - the vaccine isn’t available at will everywhere, so there’s some being a good neighbor in slowly the general spread of the vaccine as well.
As far as I can tell there are a two scenarios where life can return to something resembling normal:
1 - The obvious one, everybody (or close enough to everybody) gets partial immunity either through vaccination or through actually catching it. Variants are making this a moving target, unfortunately.
2 - Somebody comes up with and mass manufactures a good-enough therapeutic that can keep sick people out of the hospitals. To this end I’m very hopeful for the new Pfizer drug.
2. I would really like to see a proper, large RCT of ivermectin, HCQ+zinc, and the new Pfizer therapeutic. The latter costs $700 per course, apparently, and many countries won’t be able to afford it. And, exclude hospitalized patients, we’re trying to find out how to keep people out of the hospital!
> the problem is no one has actually expressed a goal we're working towards
I hadn't thought about this explicitly but I'd also say this is most of the problem. Working in academia, some facet of our policies changes on a daily basis in knee-jerk reactions. Worse yet, my area of research is infectious disease and I imagine this must be how climate scientists feel when policy decisions just get drawn out with no goal.
Unless I'm missing something, "Kids born during pandemic" would not be affected by school closures. If anything, having more parents stay at home with kids, I'd expect to result in better outcomes,though maybe I'm giving parents too much credit.
Honestly, I'd suspect that parents are around kids more and noticing and reporting more.
My child was born June 2019. I really worried about her development due to lock down: exhausted parents, no friends or extended family to interact with. Once nursery reopened her language abilities seemed to accelerate quickly. Kids really seem to thrive on a mix of experiences. Locked in house with mum and dad is not good.
Children born during the pandemic are not yet in school. This research makes little sense, measuring cognitive differences of 2 year olds is highly unlikely to be meaningful.
"measuring cognitive differences of 2 year olds is highly unlikely to be meaningful."
Do you have expert knowledge, or at least experience with lots of different 2 year olds, to make such a statement?
Because I got some experience and I can tell you, there are great differences to be meassured for sure.
Whether they meassured correctly, I do not know, but I can imagine that the chaos of the pandemic was not always helpful for child developement. Just alone the social contacts are vital for developing - and they were greatly reduced (often replaced with screen time) compared to normal 2 year olds.
> People say "things are pretty much back to normal" but parents with kids in school know this is not true.
This illustrates pretty well the absolute massive difference in how people experience the pandemic. People with kids in school and people certain types of jobs is hit extremely hard. Some absolutely struggle with home schooling, being out of a job, feeling isolated and a myriad of other issues. For others, like myself, other than having to work from home some of the time, and getting regularly tested, the whole thing has made some aspects of life much much easier. The only downside, for both me and my wife, is that there's more work to be done than ever.
> At this point in the pandemic we've should have come up with models that factor in the externalities of lockdown and factor that into policy decisions. That somehow still hasn't happened.
What makes you think it hasn’t? I’m sure all lockdown decision makers are looking at these models along with models of hospital capacity.
> People say "things are pretty much back to normal" but parents with kids in school know this is not true.
My kids school life has basically gone back to normal and has been all year. It’s my WFH situation that is never “going back to normal” but I think that’s a positive.
My kids wear masks to school too. My oldest is probably not as heavily impacted by this but I feel like my younger child has been (started K in 2019). He doesn't really know what his friends look like, he doesn't get to see facial expressions of his teachers or peers as part of their emotions, he doesn't get to see the teacher enunciate words with their mouth, he's spent a lot of time learning virtually at a young age, he gets to hide his own reactions behind a mask. He's soft spoken and his participation in class is probably suppressed a little further and dampening him being challenged or as confident. Compared to my older child, there's less enriching extracurricular activities available for the last two years as well, clubs and PTA events and sports have all been impacted.
I have no way of quantifying any of this but there's just tons of little things that have the potential to be negative impacts to his long term success. Even if my kids cope, I worry about their peers and the worrying trends in academic test data compared to previous cohorts.
These are good points. I especially relate with the lack of extra curricular activities. I would just say that I think these effects are negligible compared to keeping kids at home with virtual learning.
My kids school, in LA, still has no in-person events, no parents on campus, kids must stay 3 feet from each other, masks indoors and outdoors, weekly covid testing, regular class room shut downs for exposure after which there is zoom schooling and daily testing, no wind instruments, no field trips, no food sharing, all parent teacher meetings over zoom, etc etc etc. It's as bad a lockdown as at the peak.
I agree that externalities are important to consider, but what would such a model look like? It seems that studies like this are a necessary precursor if we are to truly estimate these external costs (so kudos to those involved).
At this point in the pandemic we should have long since moved on to everybody wearing functional respiratory PPE instead of ersatz feel-good "masks" made of cloth. This wouldn't have required any paradigm shifts, just a revisiting of supply availability. Yet here we are. The policy contours were set back in June of 2020, and now we're just trudging it out.
That needed to be done from day one. The economic shutdown combined with calling some people "unessential" has put us on a horrible path from day one. Anybody involved in any of that should never have any power ever again
So you're just going to make vague allusions to some great evil being done while providing no data? Have you thought about why you get flagged when you discuss this topic?
> Is it so much to ask for others to connect the dots?
> ...
> It depends on what you consider evil. In this context, I've yet to use such a term. Already, it sounds like you're imagining I suggested some grand conspiracy.
Perhaps if you connected your own dots rather than asking others to do it for you, they might not make connections that you didn't intend.
I prefer not to speculate about the motivations of policy makers, because I can't read minds. However, it's clear, judging by the rate of avoidable ills like opiate overdoses and type 2 diabetes, to name just a couple, that our government policy can't be called broadly successful for many of today's major public health issues.
That's not to say it's a total failure. The sanitation improvements of the mid 20th century had a huge positive effect on public health. Indoor plumbing wasn't even available in wide swaths of the USA back then.
I've checked out my year averages for 2019, 2020 and 2021, they were 5, 3.4 and 5.2 km per day. 2020 average is 2/3 of my usual per day walk distance. I try to average 5 km/day in an effort to lessen cognitive decline, because walking rises brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) level in the blood. BDNF can travel umblical cord and can enhance baby's brain development.
So, mothers walking less due to lockdowns is the simplest explanation for that cognitive impairment phenomena I could think of.
> One aspect also not investigated here is the impact of mask-wearing by the study staff during child visits and assessments [53]. The inability of infants to see full facial expressions may have eliminated non-verbal cues, muffled instructions, or otherwise altered the understanding of the test questions and instructions.
They changed their methods in 2020, so they can’t attribute this to their methods or other indirect effects of the pandemic.
i know some people said that covid-19 infection can cause brain fog in adults months after they recovered. there were also people saying that the vaccines may cause this as well. not saying i know exactly the reason for this, just pointing out arguments/news articles i read.
i will say that fear or how we handle fear can mess up learning, it’s kind of hard to take the basics seriously when the message being sent out is one of impending doom. we go into survival mode which forces us to make snap decisions in order to ensure safety. fight or flight response. our amygdala plays a huge part in learning and memory recall/storage
"In this work, therefore, we specifically sought to explore individual and population-level trends in infant
and early child neurodevelopment. Analyses of cognitive development, assessed using Mullen Scales
of Early Learning [40], a population normed and clinically administered tool that assesses function
across the five primary domains of fine and gross motor control, visual reception, and expressive and
respective language via direct observation and performance, provides some of the first direct evidence
of the developmental impact of the COVID-19 pandemic."
"The Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) is a standardized assessment that is commonly used in clinical psychology as a developmental measure of cognitive development (Mullen, 1989, 1995). The MSEL is organized into 5 subscales: (a) gross motor, (b) fine motor, (c) visual reception (or non-verbal problem solving), (d) receptive language, and (e) expressive language. An early learning composite score can be derived from fine motor, visual reception, receptive language, and expressive language scales. For young children this early learning composite score is considered equivalent to a more traditional “IQ” score or a developmental standard score."
See Figure 2 of the paper, on page 31.
Apparently, "[t]he outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and
the associated economic shut-down, school disruptions, and social distancing, stay-at-home, and
mask policies" has reduced the intelligence of newborns and young children by ~1.5 standard deviations.
you know what really impacts early cognitive performance? having one's parents die from covid. So while social distancing, closings, and masks completely suck, they have been necessary in order to attempt to maintain public health, and without them, there would have been vastly more deaths.
None of that works. Covid is here to stay. You're just saying that these kids should hide their face and stay away from their friends for their whole life
we did, we mandate seatbelts in cars, stringent safety guidelines for cars, trans fats in food were banned, and such. The actors who would otherwise be irresponsible, car drivers, car manufacturers, food providers, and in this case, people who spread disease by not being vaxxed or masked, are coerced into acting responsibly by government.
I always wonder, if the effect is so clear as they present in the title, why do they need such a complex model to show it? I call a stepwise regression complex because it requires thinking about what effect the steps have on the outcome in regards to overfitting
> Leveraging a large on-going longitudinal study of child neurodevelopment, we examined general childhood cognitive scores in 2020 and 2021 vs. the preceding decade, 2011-2019. 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.
Blatant, blatant, family-level confounding is driving this. Having kids dropped like a stone in covid, because who would be so irresponsible as to have a child during a pandemic? During lockdown? And with global warming the way it is? (The opening of _Idiocracy_ is justly famous.) So, who then is having kids...?
It's like maternal smoking. If you look at kids with mothers who smoke vs the kids with mothers who don't smoke, the latter are healthier and more functional; however, if you look at siblings whose mother smoked during one sibling's pregnancy but not the other's, they are often identical. That's because what you are measuring is the effect of 'having a mother who will smoke', not the effect of 'smoking'.
There were statistically insignificant increases in Slovenia, Norway, Denmark, South Korea, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland.
Going by this, I also think that you may have the correlation wrong. If the study is correct (more generous welfare systems => less decrease in birth rates), that seems like it would mean that people who can afford it will keep having kids.
Granted, so will people who aren't in the planning business. But it's hardly cut-and-dry like that.
(extra confounder: Northern Europe had less harsh lockdowns, maybe that plays a role?)
> Going by this, I also think that you may have the correlation wrong. If the study is correct (more generous welfare systems => less decrease in birth rates), that seems like it would mean that people who can afford it will keep having kids.
It does not matter direction what the relationship is, only that it exists at the family level and so family-level correlations are non-causal for the effect of coronavirus as claimed by OP. We should be equally skeptical for the same reason if the result had instead came out as "kids during coronavirus have 10 higher IQ points because their parents played with them more thanks to remote working and subsidies"; there is no reason to believe that changes in childbearing during coronavirus has been, in any place, exogenous and randomized, and we know that pretty much all of these relationships are partially to completely confounded, thanks to studies which do include family controls (like all the Scandinavian population registry studies which exploit siblings). The burden of proof is on anyone who wants to argue that their correlation is the one special snowflake immune to this general trend, and should be taken at 100% face value.
> There were statistically insignificant increases
“Statistically insignificant” means that you have data from a sample from which, at the desired level of confidence, you cannot be sure of any effect, or that there was not the reverse effect, in the universe from which the sample is drawn.
> Since the first reports of novel coronavirus in the 2020, public health organizations have advocated
preventative policies to limit virus, including stay-at-home orders that closed businesses, daycares,
schools, playgrounds, and limited child learning and typical activities.
Did nobody proofread this before it was published?
I wonder how this relates to children born in war zones. One of my parents was born smack in the middle of world war II, the other went through it as a young teenager. Nobody seemed to care one bit about their cognitive performance, reduced or otherwise, as long as they managed to survive first.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Of course the topic is flammable to begin with, but what you did here stands out noticeably as more flamey than the rest of the thread.
Edit: you posted a whole bunch of flamewar comments to this thread. We ban accounts that do that. Please don't do it again, regardless of what your views are or how right they are or how right you feel they are.
> People who support lockdowns aren't interested in facts; their viewpoints are shaped by marketing.
Sweeping generalizations aren't really adding to the discussion here. Please assume the best of others. We're all trying to find the best way forward with incomplete information. And tying ideas too closely to ones identity, or that of others, won't help us adapt as more evidence come to light.
>Sweeping generalizations aren't really adding to the discussion here
That sentiment fits individualist views and policies, where it behooves us to hear out individuals and consider them on their individual merits.
However the view and policy discussed (limitations on individuals for common good) is explicitly a collectivist view and policy. Applying a sweeping generalization to a collectivist view and policy is fit and proper by the very nature of collectivism.
Edit: corrected a typo from "individuals" to "individualist".
It is not possible because it is not possible to arrive at the stance via logic.
If not for the marketing campaign; certainly if not for the "original sin" of Italy's lockdown; we wouldn't even be speaking about this.
If coronavirus were highly transmissible ebola it would make sense. It's just not, most of us know tens or hundreds of people who've had it at this point (the UK has a _confirmed_ case rate of over 17%).
The original “lockdowns” were literally good for some businesses. Conventions and restaurants would have failed (they can’t survive on 10% attendance) but can’t get out of their vendor contracts without the government canceling for them.
Attendance dropped due to lockdowns and the fear campaign.
I was there, remember? The pubs were rammed, Boris started saying "don't do X", numbers decreased a lot, he said "we make this legal now", the world stopped.
I'm bored of debating this now so whatever, all I get online is a stream of trolls. Good luck.
I’m sorry you live in the UK. That must be very difficult for you.
In other places we weren’t nearly so concerned about shutting down pubs; actually the bad case that often happened in the US was leaving bars open (for tax revenue) but closing schools (because parents and teachers are more neurotic than bar goers).
Still I haven’t met a whole lot of people complaining they weren’t allowed to work. Our stimulus worked quite well there.
I don’t think lockdowns are necessary or reasonable in 2022 but at least, as someone temporarily in the UK, I’ll be able to get out of my local family trying to make me see some ridiculously quaint British thing called a “panto”.
> They have malicious intentions a priori because they treat controlling others with the same level of discipline as they would choosing which flavour of jam to put on their toast in the morning.
Not everyone advocating lockdowns is necessarily so flippant about it. Some consider the costs carefully. Please keep in mind that hospitals were being overwhelmed long before vaccines were available.
(FWIW I'm not defending absolute lockdowns since going outside with moderate distancing appears to have been safe at every stage of this phenomenon.)
If you want to lockdown, you can lockdown, and now you are safe. You don't need others to do so, the virus does not travel through windows and walls.
As such the stance is definitionally illogical which makes it flippant - it falls apart under even mild scrutiny.
I've seen about a billion variations on it now, it just gets boring to bat them off. e.g. "if the healthcare system is overwhelmed, you'll die in a minor car crash, so don't go outside, then you won't drive your car or stand near cars, then you can't die in a minor car crash anyway, err... but lockdown though!".
It's tautologically broken. The basic premise is of "not doing X, in order to not do X".
If we don't lock down and you break your leg, you may not get medical attention.
So let's lock down so that it's impossible to break your leg.
I'm totally happy to accept that contracting coronavirus could be triaged lower than acute chronic conditions, heart attacks, etc, that's an interesting debate to have because healthcare is scarce and therefore an ordering _must_ be chosen.
What makes no sense is just flinging our hands up and saying "well, stop the world for everyone instead".
That math doesn't work out, because the infection fatality ratio measures fatality - non-existence - not impaired existence.
Long covid is a thing, and affects a staggeringly large percentage of people who get covid and do not die, significantly affecting the rest of their lives. One recent study claims an infection impaired-quality-of-life ratio of over 50% (https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/how-many-people-get-...).
And in the other direction, we have lived over 2% of our lives in the pandemic living our lives, certainly not as well as any of us would have hoped, but living them nonetheless.
So either the math needs to take into account the reduced quality of life from those affected by covid (not to mention those affected by losing family members, caretakers, etc., those affected by knock-on effects like delayed surgeries, and so forth), or it needs to say, well, we haven't died from the so-called "lockdowns," so if any lives at all were saved, that outweighs the 0% of time we spent dead during them.
It is certainly still possible that the interventions were still net negative, but it's not as simple as 1% of the population dying from covid < 2% of people's lives spent in "lockdowns."
Touché, but I think it's pretty clear that even under the most generous but still fact-based interpretation of the effects of "lockdowns," covid kills a lot more people.
Not to mention that the IFR is dramatically skewed by age and obesity. Yes, early indications were that COVID was a serious, deadly pandemic, but we've had more than enough time and data at this point to recognize that this is not the plague that it is being treated as.
Those of us who are immune compromised or obese are people too. I don't expect the whole world to stop for me, though would appreciate if folks take some precautions until hospitals can manage the flood. (In the US over 40% of adults are obese.)
If the vaccine-hesitant are to be shunned and have specific restrictions levied against them for the sake of not overflowing hospitals, then so should the obese and old, IMO.
Epidemiologists look only at the pandemic aspect. Politicians should look at the economy, the welfare, the general health, the strategic issues, and more. If you really think that an epidemiologist's response will account for things like mental health of toddlers you are mistaken.
I know that politicians have a bad name today but they are still elected officials who have an incentive (elections) to do what's best for the country as a whole.
Just to clarify- it was epidemiologists who pushed, understandably from their point of view, for the same lockdowns you define overreaching. It was mostly politicians who were the most reluctant to apply them. And the pressure in this direction was mostly from populism (Trump, Bolsonaro...), and from the finance/treasure ministries which feared the economy crisis.
> I know that politicians have a bad name today but they are still elected officials who have an incentive (elections) to do what's best for the country as a whole.
Those aren't the same. The vast majority of politicians will almost always favor short-term "free candy!" decisions that they know will be popular with their base come election time, rather than make difficult decisions that would actually improve the quality of life for their constituents over even the slightly-longer term.
The politicians follow the epidemiologists and the modelers etc. On the contrary, we have a case of a lack of politicians courageous enough to say no and lead / convince the people that it is the right thing to do.
Of the podcasts I’ve listened to with scientists and epidemiologists they all say that policy is not their domain. They say we are to provide advice within our domain and keep out of policy.
Possibly there is sampling bias with the podcasts I’m listening to and the people going on them.
> Why do we let politicians rather than epidemiologists make these decisions?
I think you got it exactly backwards. Politicians have successfully scapegoated themselves via epidemiologists (who's first and last consideration is to minimize infections) and people who refuse vaccination (even though the vaccinated are still just as epidemiologically relevant.)
The second and third order effects from society's misguided Covid response will, over time, prove much much worse than the effects of the actual virus.
In the UK we closed schools, universities and workplaces during lockdowns while keeping heathrow airport open - the busiest in the country. Business travel was allowed, but nurseries were closed.
Back in September 2020, there was a big campaign in the UK press to get everyone back to work. Celebrities posed next to quotes saying you'd lose your job if you didn't go back to the office. The works. Many people went.
We chose to re-open universities, too, even though the movement of students back and forth between home and dorms was likely to be a constant flood of superspreader events.
We could have chosen to keep nurseries and primary schools open during much of the pandemic, and avoided crushing women under domestic work (which is now well documented) while harming the development of children by pulling them out of stimulating environments designed to help nurture them.
We always had a budget for transmission that varied by age group, and we decided to blow that budget on students and workers at the expense of children.
As a society, our choices and priorities are absolutely ghastly. Lockdowns were and still are right, but not for children.
We often exclude obvious apects of natural selection in these studies. In this case, the decision to have children during a pandemic may be indicative of a predisposition to poor mental functioning in the parents, which would naturally result in poorer cognitive function, on average, in the offspring.
More intelligent people would recognize the potential downsides to reproducing in a pandemic, such as (a) unknown effects of the novel coronavirus on the developing fetus, and (b) the role of excessive population density in fueling the pandemic. These more intelligent parents would tend to make the logical decision to avoid reproducing in adverse circumstances.
I predict a midwit curve. The low-intelligence/low-conscientious people will just have kids as usual; those of middling intelligence will think as you; and those of the highest intelligence will keep having kids as much as they did before.
