Small number of lockdown babies have gaps in communication skills, study shows

A small proportion of babies born in the first three months of the Covid-19 pandemic had gaps in their communication skills at the age of two and could benefit from additional support, research has found.

The study, published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, and which involved researchers from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), looked at communication and other developmental milestones in two-year-olds who were born in the first three months of the pandemic and lived through lockdowns as babies.

It then compared the results with the findings for two-year-olds who were born before the pandemic began. It built on findings from a study last year on “pandemic babies” at 12 months of age.

Their findings showed that by the age of two, parents of both pandemic and pre-pandemic babies reported similar results in areas such as movement, personal and social interactions, and solving problems.

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A small but measurable difference in answers about communication between the two groups remained, however, with a larger proportion of pandemic-born babies scoring below standardised cut-offs for developmental concern in the area of communication (11.9 per cent) when compared with babies who had been born before the pandemic (5.4 per cent).

The researchers said the findings about communication point to the need for continued screening and the importance of resources being made available to support children who may need them in the future.

Dr Susan Byrne, a study co-author from the RCSI Department of Paediatrics and FutureNeuro SFI Centre, said the lockdown presented babies with a “very different environment, where they were less likely to interact with people outside of the immediate family group”.

“In the study, we had previously shown that pandemic-born babies in Ireland had slightly reduced social communication skills relative to their counterparts who had not experienced lockdown as babies,” Dr Byrne said.

“We can’t say exactly why that was but we did show that these babies had very small social circles. In the first year of life, a quarter of the pandemic-born babies in the group did not meet another child of their own age. For this new study, we followed up with the same group of pandemic-born babies when they had just turned two.”

These findings are the first to report this mild communication deficit in pandemic-born babies in Ireland, according to study co-author Prof Jonathan Hourihane, who called for continued monitoring and support, particularly as the children approach school-going age.