this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Before we blame the pandemic, are there any studies showing whether parents have been reading to their kids these past few years, or has the iPad taken over as the parent?
Test scores took a dive during the pandemic and never recovered.
It would be really hard to point to something else other than the pandemic to note the sudden and dramatic drop.
"The pandemic" doesn't explain it.
What specifically, during the pandemic, led to a 2% drop in their scores?
Were kids not being read to at home? Did they spend all their time during lockdown watching TV?
Screen time, which should be limited to under an hour for preschool aged kids, is considerably higher than that, and it got worse during the pandemic.
It seems like parents or caregivers would be to blame for that.
A lot of pre-K education comes from daycare facilities and other methods where parents give their kids to others to care for. Take those kids and put them at home with parents who still have to work and you'll probably see a dip in education levels.
Still having to work, from home or otherwise (but mostly at home if we're talking about the pandemic), and that would still leave most regular hours to be a parent (I.e. and read to your child).
I'd like to see stats and truly know what accounts for these drops. We already know that kids spent more time in front of screens during the pandemic (for entertainment, not education), but what about parents reading to their children. There should have been MORE time, not less, to do that.
The only way to get some sort of idea is with A/B testing, which is really hard to do during a pandemic. However, there is a body of evidence to suggest that being in daycare around 3+ helps with later success in schools: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/06/quality-child-care-science-math
Also, you seem to point out to more time for parents to be able to read to kids if everyone works from home, but that may not be the case. WFH does seem to indicate that people work longer hours in total. They may also not be able to spend as much break time during the day to. Do things like read to their kids or otherwise mentally simulate them.
The study looked at "Children who receive high-quality child care as babies, toddlers and preschoolers..."
So, is the drop in reading and math a direct result of kids not getting high-quality childcare as babies and toddlers? Because I don't even think thay the majority of American parents ever had the means to make that happen outside of the home.
That might be something that only high income families could afford, but I'm not sure if the article reports on whether children from high income families also experienced a drop in reading and math scores.
Without a daily commute or prep time getting ready for the office, and especially during lockdowns when people simply didn't leave their homes, there was significantly more time for non-work related activities.
This is why so many people actually enjoyed the pandemic. They had significant amounts of free time for hobbies, exercise, etc. Bikes even sold out for like a year, because the demand for recreation cycling during the pandemic was at such a high level.
But time with your kids, even for 20 minutes of reading, offers a huge advantage to their development. This can easily be incorporated during bedtime.
In any case, I do still believe that a lack or reduction in reading at home has an impact on these scores, and I do appreciate the thoughtful discussion 🤝
You keep trying to point to your theory, but you should be able to do a literary search to find if there is some evidence to back up your claim.
Well, at least as of 2020 parents spent more time with their kids during covid. .
They also did read more to their kids in 2020 vs pre-covid. However, I can't find data suggesting that they continued reading at that rate through 2021 and 2022.
Another stat did suggest that low income kids had a harder time keeping up during covid. Factors included family members who did not know English, fewer books in the home, and low literacy rates among parents (making it hard for them to read to their kids), and more media consumption (a major factor in poor development among very young children).
So, if we put everything together, we could assume that kids in low and probably middle income families were at a disadvantage compared to kids in high income families. Since they make up the bulk of the student demographic, they were likely responsible for the drop.
If the situation at home remains bad, I'd expect these scores to continue to drop compared to previous years and other countries.
I'd say that for those families, the pandemic didn't help, but those problems were there well before covid.
I'm sorry, this seems a bit disconnected with the reality of actively working and simultaneously taking care of children. If you are working from home, there may be absolutely no or very little time to give quality instruction to children. Anecdotally, at the start of the pandemic, I was in a surgical residency. My specialty (otolaryngology) was locked down pretty hard across the nation, so I actually was at home a lot during the start of the pandemic, as there was a big scare about risk with routine ENT encounters and surgery. My wife worked in HR and was totally working from home.
For the first two months, I did most of the child care despite being in a busy surgical residency. Our children were about a year old and required a lot of active watching and caring for them. My wife may have been able to step away and change diapers and feed (sometimes she would be tied up). There was certainly no time to give quality education.
To give quality rearing and education to children while working would essentially be the equivalent of working two jobs. Working from home does not necessarily mean you log on, sit at home, and then go about your day as you like (i know some may have been able to do that, for better or worse). I'm not sure why you are insisting that parents taking on this extra burden while working (from home or not) is an unreasonable explanation for this.
I'm not insisting, the experts are. There's plenty of data that shows that this is necessary if you want a child to have normal development. Unless, of course, parents are paying for high-quality care elsewhere, which has been shown to give similar advantages.
And what's unreasonable with expecting parents... to be parents? I don't understand why any child should be disadvantaged because their parent(s) decided it was too much work to actively care and participate in their development.
When my kids were young, I was working full time, while my wife's career was put on the back-burner so she could take care of them. I still had to come home from work, help her with the kids, often staying up until 3am with a baby who had colic, then get 4 hours of sleep before heading out to work to do it again. My weekends were devoted entirely to the kids, and my wife would have a bit of a break.
It was exhausting. I get it. But it had to be done. My eldest didn't even have access to TV until she was four, so it was all about books, interaction with other kids, outings with us, and library visits for their programs. Then it turned into kindergarten, and we were still putting our energy into her development. And as she got older, it was sports and other activities that required a big commitment on our end... it really doesn't end!
Child-rearing is by far one of the most committed things a person will do in their lifetime. More than work. I don't envy anyone who has to split their time between a demanding job and their child or children.
I'm sure the overall reason is stochastic, with other concurrent contributing factors, but writing off what is generally considered to be the main reason for an acute change in educational metrics (which coincides pretty spot on with am abrupt interruption in home life and school life) doesnt seem reasonable. I haven't heard anything besides the pandemic, being the main driving force for the acute change in educational metrics. Raising a child and reading to them is different than directed education. I value the time I have with my children and read to them daily. This is very different (but complimentary to) than what they would get at some sort of structured pre-k.
This is one of those situations if your looking at the "why," you have to use judgment. All of the data is of course, retrospective, which is not as good as a prospective stuff such as a randomized controlled trial (which it would, of course be unethical to perform). When thinking about stuff like this, I like to point people out to a peer-reviewed systematic review that shows parachute is not associated with survival when jumping out of airplanes (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/). The point is, we can't always clinically study some thing in the best possible way because it's either impractical or unethical, and sometimes you just have to use your best judgement unless/until something more concrete comes to light. We cannot, ethically, do an experiment where we recreate many of the conditions at the start of the pandemic and to conduct an RCT that this drastically affect education (including early education and development).
That being said, I do agree that we should do what we can as parents to raise them, read, help educate, teach good life skills and help instill positive personality traits. I do agree that screen time, distractions, and overall pace of life have been a contributing factor to this for many years, and no-doubt, have played a role at least in the background during this acute decline.
Specifically, the closing of schools during the pandemic, leading to mass amounts of children not having access to daily reading practice.
Most parents were not able to make up that time with their kids.
Yes, I read a report from the UN stating specific reasons why the pandemic sidetracked many students, especially underprivileged ones.
Those who were given more opportunities to learn at home and not spend time in front of screens fared much better.
Exactly this. If you choose to have kids you've gotta actually nurture them and educate them.
You have to have time to nurture them, as well. I imagine a lot of parents simply don't have the time/energy because of needing to work so much to take care of their families.
I don't know why this simple fact is so often over looked. If you have to work two jobs, commute, play with your kid, do laundry, make dinner, clean up then try and relax there is NO TIME to nurture your damn kid. As a dad it's easy to see how single moms and blue collar parents have to constantly stick their kids in front of a iPad because they have nothing left to give.
Plus if the parent has trouble reading - maybe because their education was lacking - they're less likely to read to their kids. It's a vicious spiral