The pandemic helped some children develop their vocabulary

A study of 1400 preschool children in Canada has found that those tested during the covid-19 pandemic did better on several cognitive measures than those assessed before the outbreak began. The team behind these results thinks this is because these children have parents with a relatively high income who may have spent more time with them during the height of the pandemic. Most of the other studies looking at how the pandemic has affected children concluded that it has been overwhelmingly negative. However, these studies almost all looked at social and emotional skills rather than cognitive abilities and at school-age children rather than preschool children, says Mark Wade at the University of Toronto, who was involved in the latest Canadian research. "It isn't necessarily the case that the pandemic has been totally and irreversibly bad for kids," he says.