In order to curb the spread of Sars-CoV-2, people around the world restricted their social life, many states imposed lockdowns and other contact restrictions.

Researchers from the University of Medicine and Health in Dublin have now examined the influence of these measures on newborns.

Previous studies suggest that there could be such an influence, according to which a reduced social life has a negative effect on the development of communicative skills and an active social environment promotes language skills.

Early childhood development is evaluated using so-called milestones, which can be roughly divided into motor, cognitive and emotional dimensions.

Susan Byrne and her colleagues from Dublin looked at ten of these milestones.

In a longitudinal study, they compared the neuropsychological development of 309 newborns born in Dublin between March 2020 and May 2020 with a control group of children born between 2008 and 2011.

Lockdown began in Ireland on March 27, 2020. According to parents, 25 per cent of babies born during the pandemic had not had contact with any other newborn of the same age until the age of 12 months, and these families themselves also lived in isolation during the period :

Differences at four milestones

To assess the neuropsychological developmental steps, parents were given a questionnaire in which they were asked to indicate whether or not the children had "reached" certain milestones by the age of 12 months.

The results, published in the journal Archive of Disease in Childhood, show that the cohorts differed slightly but significantly at four milestones.

89 percent of babies born between 2008 and 2011 were able to say a full word by the age of 12 months, compared to just 77 percent of the newborns in the Corona group.

Also, only 84 percent of babies born in Spring 2020 were able to point with a finger, compared to 93 percent of newborns in the control group.

There were also significant differences in the ability to

to wave goodbye.

94 percent of the control group had already learned this, now it was slightly less at 88 percent of the newborns.

However, there was also a positive result for the pandemic babies: While 91 percent of the babies in the control group were able to crawl, it was 97 percent in those born in spring 2020.

Overall, the latter performed slightly but significantly worse than babies from the control group in three out of ten milestones.

The authors attribute these results to the fact that fewer communicative gestures were used due to the reduced contacts and the imitation and learning effects were weaker as a result.

On the other hand, newborns develop pointing gestures to indicate something new in their environment.

However, if you stay at home more often or have limited mobility, it is less likely that new things will be pointed out.

Other studies also point in this direction and were able to show that gross and fine motor skills as well as behaviors associated with social communication developed delayed in newborns who were born in lockdown.