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.

By the time Aelita Andre turned three, she had more art-world accolades than many professional artists. She started painting at nine months old, and galleries were showing her work when she was just two. Now 14 years old, the Australian abstract artist is still going strong; she just closed her most recent solo show in South Korea this month. Most children are innately creative and curious. But some are obsessively so and as adults end up transforming their field--or the world.

Parents not enforcing boundaries and being unwilling to chastise children has led to a generation of'infantilised millennials', according to a sociology professor. In his book, Why Borders Matter, Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at Kent University, says a lack of clear boundaries has created a childlike generation. Not chastising children or using moral-based judgements'deprives them of a natural process' of fighting against parental rules and boundaries, says Furedi. He says children develop by reacting against boundaries given to them by parents and society, and over three or four generations those parameters have weakened. This has led to millennials in their twenties acting the way they did in their teenage years and refusing to embrace adulthood, he explained in his book.