As more and more can be read about the scars of this pandemic in the minds and souls of children, parents prick up their ears.
Especially when the verdict seems to have already been made: "lost generations", such exaggerations are encountered far too often - with persistently thin scientific evidence.
But is it really so dramatic when the offspring are less often allowed to go to the playground or meet friends and relatives?
An international team of development researchers at the Universities of Göttingen and Oslo and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics examined language acquisition in children aged eight months to three years during the first weeks of lockdown in 2020.
The parents of more than 2,200 young children in thirteen countries were interviewed extensively, compared to similar pre-pandemic studies, and the results are now published in Scientific Reports and Language Development Research.
Conclusion: Even in the socio-economically better off families, the prescribed contact restrictions were met with more screen time for the little ones, and all the more so the stricter the lockdown was.
But the language acquisition of the offspring has by no means suffered.
The children even learned more words than the scientists expected.
Roughly formulated, the explanation for this is: creative mobile learning.
A large proportion of the parents compensated for the lack of experience by using the mobile phone with their offspring.
Of course, if you want, you can still call it a lockdown catastrophe if the little ones and parents extended their screen times.
But you can also interpret the finding as simply as the scientists do: it helps to take some of the worry out of the young parents who are stressed by the pandemic.