3.C: COVID-19 Impact on Infancy and Toddlerhood

Birth Rate:

Births in the U.S. during 2020 were down 4% from 2019, resulting in approximately 95,000 fewer births (Hamilton et al., 2021). This follows a downward trend since 2007. The majority of babies born in 2020 were conceived in 2019, and do not reflect effects from the pandemic. However, provisional data indicate that births in December 2020, January 2021, and February 2021 were down 8% compared with the same three months in 2020 (Stobbe, 2021). The birth rate dropped in nearly every age group and ethnicity resulting in 41,000 fewer births. These decreases indicate that the pandemic resulted in lower rates of conception and subsequent births than the previous year. Similar low birth rates have been noted in other countries (Falk, 2021). Lower fertility rates are expected to affect future economic and job growth due to a lack of eligible workers. Some countries are already putting in place programs to encourage population growth among its citizens.

Language Development:

Faces provide essential information for infants to learn how to communicate, and seeing partially covered faces gives infants only limited linguistic information (Lewkowicz, 2021). By 8 months of age, infants begin lip reading and this allows them to see visible speech cues and figure out which face goes with which voice. Noteworthy, is that infants who lip read more have better language skills when older. With facial masks, babies cannot access these visual cues. At home with unmasked family members, this may not have been much of a concern. However, when in day care or out in the community, infants missed important cues by being surrounded by speakers wearing masks. Wearing masks was essential for safety during COVID-19 at child care centers, and many parents needed to keep sending their infant to daycare, especially those parents who were essential workers. For parents who did not have access to child care and worked from home, providing their infants with the language modeling they needed also may have proved difficult given the parents' busy schedules. Additionally, the infants were not socializing with others, and consequently did not have as many language models, which is critical for language development (Danino, 2020). Consequently, for some infants the pandemic may have adversely impacted their language skills.