Parental Cognitive Stimulation of Young Children Before and After the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Most families were not followed across the pandemic, so the before and after groups were different people and were not closely comparable in background. When the analysis was restricted to the three studies that did have data on both sides of the pandemic, the overall increase disappeared and everyday verbal responsivity declined instead of rising, which undercuts the headline result. Cognitive stimulation was reported by parents on a questionnaire, not observed, so parents may have described what they thought they should be doing. Every family was already taking part in an evaluation of a parenting programme, so they may not look like other urban parents with low incomes. The questionnaire was not given in the same form across studies, child ages or timepoints, and at the start of the pandemic it moved from in-person to phone or video, which the authors say may have added noise and may have biased results in ways nobody can measure. Except for the three studies with both timepoints, the pandemic period and the families assessed during it are tangled together, so a change over time and a difference between families cannot be told apart.

The authors state that they have no conflicts of interest relevant to the article to disclose. The supplied text does not name a funder.

Do not read this as the pandemic improving parenting. Only three of the seven studies had families assessed both before and after the pandemic, and when the researchers looked at just those three the overall score stopped rising and everyday verbal responsivity fell instead of rising. For most of the sample the before and after groups were different parents, so the increases rest on comparing different families rather than watching the same families change.