A report has claimed that lockdowns and mask mandates are responsible for stunting babies development. A team of Irish researchers found that children born during the pandemic were less likely to have said their first words by their first birthday compared to babies born pre-Covid.
According to The Mail Online:
The team say face masks limited children’s ability to read facial expressions or see people’s mouths move — a crucial part of learning to speak.
Bans on visiting grandparents and relatives were also blamed for depriving them of vital socializing time.
In the paper, led by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, researchers looked at 309 babies born between March and May 2020.
Ireland was in lockdown for five months over that year, and spent many others under tight restrictions.
Parents were surveyed about 10 developmental milestones after their child turned one year old.
These included: saying one definite word, finger pointing, waving bye, being able to stand, stepping sideways, crawling and stacking bricks.
The results were compared to 2,000 babies born between 2008 and 2011.
Lockdown babies were 14 per cent less likely to have said one definite word, results showed.
They were also nine per cent less likely to have started pointing, and six per cent less likely to wave goodbye.
On the other hand, however, they were also significantly more likely to be crawling — at seven per cent.
Writing in the release, the College said: ‘Lockdown measures may have reduced the repertoire of language heard and the sight of unmasked faces speaking to [infants].
‘It may also have curtailed opportunities to encounter new items of interest, which might prompt pointing, and the frequency of social contacts to enable them to learn to wave bye-bye.
‘[But] they were still more likely to be crawling… which might be because they were more likely to have spent more time at home on the ground rather than out of the home in cars and strollers.’
