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COVID Lockdowns Disrupted a Crucial Social Skill Among Preschoolers, Study Finds
Lockdowns. Social distancing. Shuttered schools and businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic and its sweeping disruptions set off a stampede of “what it’s doing to us” research, focused largely on schoolchildren. How were students’ academics affected? Their mental health? Their social development?
Left unexamined was whether the pandemic impacted the social cognition of preschool children — kids younger than 6 — whose social norms were upended by daycare closures and families sheltered at home.
That changed when a UC Merced research team, looking at data it had started to gather before the pandemic, discovered children ages 3½ to 5½ tested before and after COVID-19 lockdowns revealed a significant gap in a key cognitive skill, particularly for children from homes with low financial resources and adults with less education.
“It was remarkable to see the drop in kids’ performance,” said developmental psychology Professor Rose Scott, the lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports. “On one of the tasks in my lab, children tested before the pandemic could pass at 2 and a half years old. Right after the lockdowns, we were seeing 5-year-olds not passing it.”
RFK Jr. Calls for a ‘Fix’ of US Food Supply During Senate Hearing
Department of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made it clear in his first US Senate confirmation hearing that his quest to reduce chronic disease would entail a closer look at the food industry, namely manufacturers of packaged foods.
RFK Jr., tapped by President Donald Trump in mid-November to serve as HHS secretary, was grilled mainly about his stances on vaccines, abortion, Medicaid, and the cost and coverage of health care and prescription drugs. But in his Senate Finance Committee hearing on Jan. 29, Kennedy — the leader of the administration’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, initiative — also said the rising incidence of chronic health conditions like diabetes, heart disease and others warrants more scrutiny of the U.S. food supply.
“We’re having epidemics of all these chronic illnesses, autoimmune diseases, neurological diseases, allergic diseases, obesity,” Kennedy told Finance Committee members. “When my uncle was president, 3% of Americans were obese. Today, 74% of Americans are obese or overweight. No other country has anything like this. In Japan, the obesity rate is still 3%. Epidemics are not caused by genes.
Genes may provide the vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin, or something is poisoning the American people. And we know that the primary culprits are our changing food supply, the switch to highly chemical-intensive processed foods.”
American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows
In the latest release of federal test scores, educators had hoped to see widespread recovery from the learning loss incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead, the results, from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, tell a grim tale, especially in reading: The slide in achievement has only continued.
The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33%. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40%.
Some Children Starting School ‘Unable to Climb Staircase’, Finds England and Wales Teacher Survey
Some children are starting reception school “unable to climb a staircase,” while others use Americanisms in their speech because of too much screen time, according to a survey of teachers.
The pandemic has been blamed for a decline in school readiness among reception-aged children, but some teachers who took part in the annual poll said the “Covid baby” explanation was starting to feel like an excuse. The survey of 1,000 primary teachers in England and Wales, carried out by the market research group Savanta on behalf of the early years charity Kindred2, found 49% of teachers thought the problem had gotten worse over the past year.
The government has made school readiness one of its core missions, with an ambition for 75% of children to reach a good level of development by the time they join reception — up from the current level of 68%.
Gen Z Seeks Safety Above All Else as the Generation Grows Up Amid Constant Crisis and Existential Threat
After many years of partisan politics, increasingly divisive language, finger-pointing and inflammatory speech have contributed to an environment of fear and uncertainty, affecting not just political dynamics but also the priorities and perceptions of young people.
As a developmental psychologist who studies the intersection of media and adolescent mental health, and as a mother of two Gen Z kids, I have seen firsthand how external societal factors can profoundly shape young people’s emotional well-being.
This was brought into sharp relief through the results of a recent survey my colleagues and I conducted with 1,644 young people across the U.S., ages 10 to 24. The study was not designed as a political poll but rather as a window into what truly matters to adolescents.
We asked participants to rate the importance of 14 personal goals. These included classic teenage desires such as “being popular,” “having fun” and “being kind.”
None of these ranked as the top priority. Instead, the No. 1 answer was “to be safe.”
Autism Researchers Shed Light on How α2δ Protein Mutations Affect Neurodevelopmental Processes
A study in the journal Pharmaceuticals has uncovered how specific genetic mutations in α2δ-1 and α2δ-3 proteins linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASD) alter neuronal functionality. These mutations significantly reduce the proteins’ membrane expression and synaptic targeting but do not impair calcium channel activity or trans-synaptic signaling.
Conducted at Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences within the research focus Mental Health and Neuroscience, the research provides a fresh perspective on how subtle disruptions in protein function may influence synapse formation and neuronal networks.
The results underscore the need for new experimental tools and might offer new angles for developing targeted treatments addressing the complex biology of ASD.
Autism spectrum disorder, a complex neurodevelopmental condition, affects millions worldwide and is marked by challenges in communication, social behavior and repetitive actions.
