Education Week - April 27, 2022 - 4

Babies Are Saying
Less Since the
Pandemic: Why
Schools Should
Worry
By Sarah D. Sparks
To avoid widespread school readiness
gaps, children born since the pandemic
need an immediate language
infusion.
" It seems like a lot of our kids now
are not where other kids have been.
They're not cooing and they're not
doing the things that I have witnessed
in the past, " said Brittany Ferguson,
an Early Head Start teacher in Longmont,
Colo. " In the next years, as
these kids are coming into school, it is
going to be challenging because of just
how different things have been. "
Ferguson's not alone. New studies
from Rhode Island Hospital and the
nonprofit LENA Foundation find that
infants born during the pandemic vocalize
significantly less and engage in
less verbal " turn-taking " behaviors
found to be critical for language development.
As those babies grow, experts
worry they will need significant supports
to be ready for school.
Already, studies find a third of children
who started school during the
pandemic need " intensive " reading
help, and the need may become even
more widespread for children born in
the last few years.
Gaps seen in engagement
and language development
Since 2010, Sean Deoni, the director
of the Advanced Baby Imaging Lab
at the INSPIRE Center of Rhode Island
Hospital, and his colleagues have
tracked more than 1,700 Rhode Island
families with infants. The researchers
conduct regular cognitive and language
development tests as well as
brain scans as the children grow and
monitor how the children are exposed
to language in their earliest years of
life.
During the pandemic, the lab was
able to continue its assessments, but
Deoni said he and his colleagues
quickly realized their study population
was changing.
" We began to notice anecdotally
several months into the pandemic
that kids seemed to be having a little
greater challenge in doing their cognitive
tests, " Deoni said. " Children
just seemed to be taking a little bit
longer to get through their assessments;
they maybe weren't as attentive
or not performing as well as we
normally had seen. And over time,
those individual anecdotal statements
became a chorus. "
By a year into the pandemic, the average
cognitive performance of children
ages 3 months to 3 years was the
lowest it had been since the researchers
had begun to measure it in 2010.
For toddlers ages 16 months or younger,
expressive and receptive language
scores fell from about 90 points on a
scale of 140 in 2020 to 60 in 2021 on
normalized assessments of verbal
skills. Moreover, neuroimaging data
show babies born during the pandemic
have had slower growth in white
matter, the communication channels
of the brain, compared to infants born
in the years before the pandemic.
" It's not that they start off low and
they'll slowly get back to [normal], but
[they] actually seem to be decreasing
as time is going on, which means that
the cumulative impact of the COVID
environment seems to be getting
worse, " he said. " And this seems to
be across the brain, impacting not just
motor systems or later cognitive systems,
but almost every neurodevelopmental
system. So that's alarming. "
Both Deoni's research and separate
research by the LENA Foundation
suggest these developmental delays
may be sparked by less language engagement.
Adults
help infants build language
by
skills
" conversational
turn-taking " -speaking
in response to a baby's
coos or cries and then pausing to
let the baby or toddler vocalize back
to them. Parents often use exchanges
like these to answer their children's
needs or encourage their interests.
But these expressive exchanges
have been more challenging during
the pandemic. Children under 5 remain
the only age group unable to
be vaccinated against the coronavirus
that causes COVID-19. Both Ferguson
and Brigitte Willis, owner and
teacher of A Better Day child care in
Grovetown, Ga., said they were able to
continue to teach in person throughout
the pandemic because of mitigation
strategies like hygiene, using face
masks, and social distancing, but have
to " do extra " to ensure infants and toddlers
still can engage linguistically.
" We're missing the facial expressions,
wearing masks, " Ferguson said.
" If you're feeding a baby a bottle or
changing a diaper, or if someone's
crying, they don't necessarily get to
see you smile and talk. And if they are
young enough, they might hear you
talk across the room [while physically
distanced], but they don't necessarily
know it's directed toward them. "
In the three years before the pandemic,
a 2-year-old in the Rhode Island
study heard, on average, 100-140
words per hour, and had 35-50 conversational
exchanges with the adults
around them. By contrast, in 2020 and
4 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 27, 2022 | www.edweek.org
We began
to notice
anecdotally
several months
into the
pandemic that
kids seemed
to be having
a little greater
challenge in
doing their
cognitive tests.
SEAN DEONI
Director, Advanced Baby
Imaging Lab at the INSPIRE
Center of Rhode Island Hospital
2021, a 2-year-old heard about 20-70
words an hour and had 15-25 conversational
exchanges per hour. Deoni also
found toddlers during the pandemic
spent a greater portion of their time
watching television. (The American
Academy of Pediatrics recommends
no media use for children under 2.)
Jill Gilkerson, the LENA Foundation's
language research director,
tracks infants' language environment
through a recording device attached to
a harness. The infant or toddler wears
the harness at home over several days,
and the recorder is triggered by verbal
sounds made by both the infant and
others around her, screening out nonverbal
sounds like burps.
Gilkerson found on average, that
while vocalizations fell for all infants
born after the pandemic, the drop
was greatest for the poorest 25 percent
of children. The lowest-income
babies and toddlers fell from the 50th
percentile to the 25th percentile in the
frequency of their vocalizations, and
from the 45th percentile to the 25th
percentile in the number of conversational
exchanges they had with caregivers.
Gilkerson
and Deoni both urged
education leaders to partner with local
early-childhood educators and parents
to provide more language enrichment
for children born during the pandemic.
For example, Ferguson said
she has increased the overall amount
of reading and singing she does with
her infants and toddlers, and has started
touching a child whenever she
speaks to draw their attention.
Willis worked with a coach from the
LENA Grow program, which provides
professional development around
child language development, for eight
weeks in 2020 to measure and increase
how often she spoke with and encouraged
vocal responses from her five students
ages 7 months to nearly 3 years.
Willis said she has tested many kinds
of face masks to find ones that muffle
her voice as little as possible and,
" I'm slowing down, trying to enunciate
clearly and be as intentional as possible
when I speak " to the children.
Ferguson agreed: " Even though
they can't necessarily see me smile at
them, I'm just trying to pull them in as
much as I can. "
Parent engagement is crucial
Even before children start formal
school, experts said school staff can
have a role in helping parents converse
with their infants and toddlers more
explicitly.
A separate study in the Journal of
Early Childhood Literacy found that
while parents reported reading with
their young children as often during
the pandemic as before, they were
more distracted and less likely to read
complex books or to have conversations
while reading.
Similarly, more families have turned
to e-books and apps for even toddlers
to read. But one recent meta-analysis
found most commercially available
e-books don't focus a child's attention
as well as adults do when reading
a story with a child, such as by asking
questions, pointing out story elements,
or highlighting chains of events.
Willis said it's important for educators
not to blame or lecture parents
who have had less time to engage their
young children verbally.
" Parents are trying to deal with so
much, you know, and juggle so many
different things, " Willis said. " I try to
come from a strength-based approach
for parents ... to make sure they have a
ton of information and resources [on
engagement] ready at their touch. "
But Gilkerson said providing more
training and support for parents in
early literacy can pay off. In a separate
study, Gilkerson found that after families
participated in a 10-week program
to learn conversational strategies,
their infants had an 8 percent increase
in vocalizations and a 30 percent increase
in conversational turns.
" The stark reality is we are going to
have a generation of children who are
going to start less ready for school, "
Gilkerson said. " Kids are resilient
and we know a lot of them can see a
bounce back, but we want to start as
early as possible. I worry about the
children whose parents have fewer resources.
It's going to be harder to get
that bounce back. "
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Education Week - April 27, 2022

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