Were 'Covid Kids' Really Damaged? What 17 New Studies Show

0:00Dr. Aliza Pressman:At Great Wolf Lodge, there's an adventure for the whole family. And I am very excited that there is a lodge in Anaheim close to me. You know, maybe I can go check it out. And with 23 lodges across the country, that means there's probably one near you too. You and your pack can splash away at an indoor water park where it's always 84 degrees. There's a wave pool, a lazy river, and a bunch of massive water slides, including ones your family can enjoy together. They even have adventure-packed attractions from MagiQuest, a live-action game kids can play throughout the lodge to the Northern Lights Arcade.

0:35Dr. Aliza Pressman:The quest is one of the coolest parts, and there's also a bunch of great dining options and complimentary daily events like nightly dance parties. All of this happens under one roof. With 23 lodges across the country, you're always only a short drive away from adventure. So bring your pack together at a lodge near you. Learn more at greatwolf.com and go ahead and strengthen the pack. If I said to you, close your eyes, I'm going to tell you, Aliza, we reviewed 17 longitudinal studies, the impacts of COVID across a ton of different outcomes, reading and math and executive functioning and mental health and substance abuse and infants' biological aging.

1:14What do you think this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic did? You would say bad things. And I'm here to tell you the bottom line is that's not the conclusion. That's just not, right? So like, I think that's what's important.

1:28Dr. Aliza Pressman:So many people attribute so many problems in today's youth, both cognitive and social emotional challenges to COVID, to being COVID babies or COVID children. So I wanted to know what the research really shows. And there's a new paper out in developmental psychology, which is the preeminent journal of the field. and one of the authors is joining us today to let us know what really is happening with development. Did it really upend what's going on and what the normal processes are or are things not quite what they seem? Dr. Anna Johnson is a professor of psychology at Georgetown University and the author, co-author of this big paper.

2:13Dr. Aliza Pressman:She's also one of my first colleagues because we went to graduate school together. So this is a very special opportunity for me to get to be in conversation with someone I've known for so long who I trust and respect so much. I'm Dr. Aliza Pressman, developmental psychologist, New York Times bestselling author, associate clinical professor at the Icahn School of Medicine, and the host of Raising Good Humans podcast. I am so glad you're here. Let's talk about this. So what did the COVID pandemic do? What did we learn? What did we think it did to our youth? What did it actually do? What were your findings?

2:59Like, say everything. Okay, well, can we back up and say that these are not all my findings, although I have done research in this area too.

3:07Dr. Aliza Pressman:But to be fair. Spoken like a proper researcher. Actually, why don't you explain what this special paper is? The premier professional society for child development is called the Society for Research and Child Development. They have a flagship journal called Child Development. And Child Development hosts special sections that they publish, which is a collection of papers around a particular topic. This is very rigorous. Very rigorous. So it's the top journal of the top international largest professional association of child development, you know, researchers and practitioners in the world. So it's a top line publication that, you know, publishes these kind of special sections, which are collections of papers.

3:53Two colleagues of mine and I proposed to collect and edit papers that would speak to a special topic. In this case, what are the kind of sustained or persistent impacts of COVID across like many domains of development all over the world? That was kind of the topic of the special section. So my colleagues, Seth Pollock at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Gabby Livis at UT Austin, have been doing this work in our own research for a couple of years and decided to put together one of these special sections, collections of papers. And so we put out a call for papers and we got, you know, 130 something letters of interest.

4:35And then from those, we had to invite kind of promising manuscripts. and from those, you know, we then went through a rigorous peer review process like you would do at any top scientific journal. And ultimately, we have 17 papers that are going to be coming out as part of this special section in child development. Okay. And so what were the goals

4:55Dr. Aliza Pressman:of it? Just truly to sort of assess where are we now? Yeah, really. You know, much of the early kind of flurry of research, acute kind of pandemic research. There was actually a special section in child development published in 2020 or 2021. A couple other big journals did the same thing around the same time, 2020 and 2021, kind of documenting what do we know right now? But we were still really in the thick of, you know, social isolation, school closing across the country, you know, pandemic acute phase, I would say still. So this was like a, okay, five years after that, What do we know? You know, are the things that we saw that were very alarming or the things that we just kind of hypothesized would be alarming?

5:38Are they true? Are they still there? Have they gotten worse? Have they gotten better? What are the impacts on kids, youth, and families?

5:45Dr. Aliza Pressman:I want to talk about all the findings as they relate to how parents are thinking about what they're blaming on the pandemic, what they're worried about from, you know, five years later. But also, I think the general tone for parents right now is everything is catastrophic. So this, to me, is so heartening that it is really hard to derail human development. That is that is the top level finding from this collection of 17 extremely, you know, well designed longitudinal studies published in this top journal subjected to rigorous review. I feel like the top level finding is that it's very hard to fundamentally derail development.

6:30Period. That's not to say that there are not areas in which kids are still struggling. And it's not to say that everything is where it would have been had there never been a pandemic. First of all, that's unknowable. And second of all, it's probably not true. And I want to honor, I think, the real experiences of not just families, but also teachers. Teachers still say, you know, my gosh, I've been a third grade teacher for 20 years. Never have I had a class of third graders who can't sit still, can't finish, you know, five multiplication problems without needing to get up. Like these are, you know, pandemic kids.

7:00Absolutely. there's effects, but I think the top level finding is that, you know, it's not nearly as catastrophic as was originally predicted or as the popular news, I think, continues to talk about it.

7:10Dr. Aliza Pressman:Okay. So what do you want people to know? Human development and child development is resilient and, you know, will thrive despite historic, you know, once in a generation disruption. I think like big, you know, exciting take-home messages from this body of, you know, what did we learn from COVID research the last six years? First of all, based on parents' own self-report, the pandemic was not universally catastrophic. So a third of parents, depending on, you know, which study you're talking about, reported that their perception, their own experience of the impact of COVID was neutral to positive.

7:55So it was not universally terrible. And this is including low-income families for whom lots of, you know, narratives have been told about how it was just definitely devastating for those at the kind of lowest socioeconomic levels. It does not seem to be the case. So parents themselves did not experience this disruption as that disruptive. That's huge because, as we know, parents are the buffers for kids. So if parents are saying it wasn't actually that bad, again, not all parents, but a bunch of parents, then it wasn't that bad for their kids in their home. Second of all, that's borne out in the effects on kids.

8:30So not catastrophic effects on reading, lots of evidence of recovery and reading and math, not catastrophic effects on kids internalizing behavior symptoms, that's worry and sadness, or externalizing behavior, you know, decreases and then recovery or growth, particularly when kids got back into their normal school environments where they're surrounded by peers and teachers and kind of back to their normal routine. So with more time to assess pandemic impacts, we find out that it wasn't so bad for all parents after all. And perhaps because of that, or perhaps just independently, perhaps just because development proceeds and persists and our drive as humans is to succeed and be okay, perhaps just because of that, kids recovered, both across mental health, behavior, and academic skills.

9:23Have they recovered completely? No. Is their sign of recovery more than their sign of catastrophic loss and devastation? 100 % yes. Those are the take-homes. And I would say, you know, how do we know that? Well, you know, there's a lot of evidence in the studies that we reviewed and are publishing as part of this special section that suggests that, you know, there's been substantial catch up so that, you know, yes, there might have been an initial decrease in skills, let's say reading skills, for instance. But that in one particular example, you know, a large public school district in the U.S., kids reading skills by second grade.

10:02So, you know, they experienced school closures in kindergarten by second grade. They were they were on the same level as second graders who had never experienced a pandemic.

10:09Dr. Aliza Pressman:So what were the things that seemed like they were the most harmful? And what were the things that seemed the most protective? I think like if we think about risk factors, you know, surprising to no one probably is, you know, pre-existing risk factors predicted greater, you know, risk later and worse outcomes. So in one particular set of findings, you know, kids who are already on a trajectory of substance abuse, for instance, deepened those patterns during and after the pandemic. So if you were already an adolescent substance user, there might have been, you know, more substance use on the other side.

10:48Dr. Aliza Pressman:What's so interesting is that I feel like during that time, people were saying, well, there's less substance use for adolescents because they're sort of stuck at home. So can you help explain this? Probably not, because that's like a how do we take an anecdote that like people have observed and merge it with like a large, you know, study of adolescence substance use trajectories. I don't know. You know, absolutely. There are cases in which, you know, kids who would have been out, you know, doing things with peers didn't have the chance to do that. But if you're looking at like pre pandemic trajectories, like what were kids doing before the pandemic and then what were they doing afterwards it does seem like in a in a group of adolescents in this particular study so this was a u.s based uh community sample of middle to you know upper socioeconomic status households that substance use frequency um was higher during the pandemic than before especially among the earlier frequent users and it was exacerbated by like other things that we might think, you know, would typically exacerbate substance use.

12:00So,

12:01Dr. Aliza Pressman:you know, household financial risk and things like that. So is that to say that, you know, every middle to upper income household with a teenager experienced, you know, a teenager who was previously using who increased their use? No, of course not. But, you know, that is one pattern that was reported in this findings. I would say that's one of the only kind of deepening of negative patterns in that sense that we saw. But I think there is a larger theme of early risk connoted later risk. And that's true aside from a pandemic. We know that developmentally for years. That's what kind of risk and resilience theory tells us.

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14:50Dr. Aliza Pressman:Okay, so for the academic side of things, talk about that. Yeah, I mean, I think there's been like a kind of pervasive public narrative that, you know, learning loss is a phrase that's used a lot. Learning loss, learning loss. Yeah. And a lot of that popular news is based on the NAEP test, which is a test that's given, you know, every couple of years to public school students in the U.S. Fourth grade and eighth grade are common, you know, points there. data from NAEP, you know, pre and post pandemic suggests that, you know, kids are lower than they were, you know, cohorts tested before the pandemic.

15:32And the major issue with that kind of research is you're comparing two different cohorts of kids, one of whom never experienced a pandemic with a group that did. And so, you know, fourth graders in 2019 had not experienced the kind of cumulative disruptive environment of COVID, whereas fourth graders in 2022 did. And if you compare those two sets of fourth graders, the fourth graders in 2022 do worse. That has been mostly what has been talked about in the popular news as evidence of learning loss. one of the preconditions of this special section was that the studies all had to follow the same group of kids over time so we wanted to eliminate this comparison of two different cohorts and have each trajectory so same kids pre-pandemic same kids during pandemic same kids post-pandemic what's happening if you kind of control for those within child differences instead of comparing across kids and what you find with academic skills when you do that is just a much more modest pattern and signs of recovery.

16:34So kids who are coming back to pre-pandemic levels, if not higher, you know, positive growth once the pandemic was over and kids returned to in-person schooling. We have data from a sample in a large U.S. school district, but also a sample from Uruguay, which shows that like large, you know, early during pandemic effects on reading and math or school readiness rather seem to reduce to become much, much smaller by third grade. So it seems like, at least with academic skills, like development is quite resilient. Incredible. You know, it's not a story of loss. It might have been some slowed growth and then a pickup and recovery.

17:19Dr. Aliza Pressman:Will you kind of go through mental health findings? So typically in adolescence, you see like decreases in parent-child closeness. That's kind of considered to be, you know, part of what happens during adolescence. And maybe increases in like adolescent depressive symptoms. And one study, which was a sample, I believe, from mainland China, found that parent-child closeness actually did not experience that same decrease, possibly as a function of just, you know, social isolation and smaller, you know, bubbles of community during pandemic that were restricted to family. So parent-child closeness seemed to not take such of a hit.

18:02And it was a protective factor, possibly, because adolescents, although they showed in that study an increase in depressive symptoms during the kind of acute pandemic period, they kind of returned back down again and recovered. And so there wasn't this cumulative increasing effect of adolescent depression over time. And that could have been, you know, mitigated by more, you know, our child closeness, which would be great.

18:29Dr. Aliza Pressman:Yeah. And I mean, George Bonanno's research sort of suggests that we kind of return to our, like, even if there is an uptick, we kind of return to our baseline, right? I think that's a good point. I mean, I think and I think that like I mean, there's scads of other research that is not even necessarily developmental, but suggest that like we have this, you know, equilibrium even when something really great happens. Right. So like there's there's evidence that like winning the lottery, like you experience a burst in happiness and then within a few months. Yeah, exactly. So like bad things, you know, you're going to come back and good things are going to come back down.

19:07Dr. Aliza Pressman:But in the end, we kind of return to where we came from. So what else did we learn about mental health with this research? I think one thing that was interesting, although not necessarily part of this special section, but there are other kind of papers being published around the same time that might explain some of these findings, suggests that there's a substantial proportion of parents, particularly low-income parents in urban settings, who reported during pandemic levels of distress to be substantially lower than what I think the popular kind of take has been. Some parents, for instance, in a sample that we're collecting, so my colleagues and I are actually running one of these longitudinal studies, 33 % of low-income parents, majority whom are non-white in this sample, reported that the impact of COVID on their lives was neutral to positive.

20:05And so that's reflected across several other studies and could be an explanation for, you know, why we don't see these catastrophic effects on academic skills or child mental health, at least in the collection of studies that I'm referring to. And so how the parents were doing and are doing, how much how much did that contribute to how the kids are doing? I think a lot. I mean, as always. Right. So like parents are particularly for younger kids are going to be, you know, the bulwark and kind of like the most important touch point for kids. And that's true, you know, in pandemic and non-pandemic times.

20:44Dr. Aliza Pressman:And so I think to the extent that parents perceptions, it doesn't have to, you know, perception is reality. Right. So parents perceptions of the impact of covid, if it was neutral to positive and they are, you know, either communicating that to their kids or creating an environment in which that is the kind of general sense that, you know, it was a buffer for kids to experience that is my hypothesis. What other buffers or like what other examples of us as buffers did you see? I think, you know, this idea that parent-child closeness, you know, has a relationship with adolescent depression, I think is important.

21:29I think, you know, what parents were doing at home could have mitigated negative effects of like school closures on particularly reading. So we know that like reading development and language development is like socially mediated. A lot of language learning and reading development in the early years happens through conversation. And that seemed to continue during even the most acute moments of COVID, which is why generally we see, I think, less effects of school closure periods on reading than we do on math. So math is harder to teach at home, but reading and language happens when families are just talking.

22:08I think that's a huge role for parents. I think parents buffered kids from language and reading and literacy losses by simply being conversation partners and, you know, having language-mediated interactions in the home. So I think there's a buffer for mental health and there's a buffer for academic skills as well. That is so – I know that this is like me getting overly excited with your incredibly professional and calm tone. But I think that every bit of this that we can hear and internalize would be so helpful because every day the world is coming at us with just how

22:52Dr. Aliza Pressman:awful things are and things will be for our children. and that it matters how we're taking it in and how it's being reflected in our household and in our own relationships. And I guess I'm stretching it because that's not what you were looking at, but I can't help but see some kind of lesson in this for the larger picture of like the catastrophe that is life today. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that is, I think that's reassuring. And I think parents in particular and parents from all, you know, backgrounds should feel that there are, you know, things that that we do as parents, like on average, that are just part of our daily interactions with our children that are incredibly supportive.

23:44And, you know, you don't need to be a parenting expert or read a parenting book necessarily, although those are wonderful things to do, too. I think that's right. I think there's there's a lot that that parents get credit for, deserve credit for and teachers, too. You know, it's not just parents. Right. So there's adults and children's lives who matter. And I think, you know, I'll circle back to some more mental health findings that we uncovered in this special section. But with respect to early childhood teachers, for instance, one of the studies that we ended up including in this special section focused on early Head Start intervention programs.