babies are likely more resilient than we think and this loss will be temporary
What makes you think so? My prior is that ‘babies are more resilient than we think’ is a fashionable idea because the opposite would be tantamount to blaming parents, especially poor ones, and that’s unfashionable. I’m interested in learning more about the topic.
Here’s a study where they try to predict adult IQ from infant IQ, the correlation is something like 0.32, so about 10% of the variance of adult IQ is explainable by infant IQ, meaning that low-IQ babies can in fact end up with large IQs as adults, which would either indicate that infant cognitive development measures are pretty bad for predicting adult IQ or that it doesn’t matter that much what you do to a baby in the first years of life. There’s also the existence of periods of historical deprivation where babies have been subjected to much worse conditions than during lockdowns, and they didn’t all end up as village idiots like you’d expect from a 2 standard deviation drop. But still, even if most of the effect is going to disappear, something like a 5 point drop in IQ would be a catastrophe, let alone a 30 point one.
Please note that “infant IQ” is a very non-standard use; the article says “ability to process information” instead.
Before three years, things are so difficult to measure that even mental retardation is not diagnosed at that age. I am not surprised by the correlation being low; but from my perspective it simply means “if you try to measure a baby’s mental life, you will get a lot of noise”.
infant cognitive development measures are pretty bad for predicting adult IQ
They are probably also pretty bad for predicting IQ at the age of five years.
(I don’t have evidence for this that I could link; it’s just my understanding of how things work.)
One of the reasons is that in people 3 and more years old, we can distinguish between someone being generally smart/slow vs someone having a specific talent/disorder (e.g. “a genius kid with dyslexia”); but a baby does not have a sufficiently wide range of specialized activities to diagnose this.
What makes you think so? My prior is that ‘babies are more resilient than we think’ is a fashionable idea because the opposite would be tantamount to blaming parents, especially poor ones, and that’s unfashionable. I’m interested in learning more about the topic.
Here’s a study where they try to predict adult IQ from infant IQ, the correlation is something like 0.32, so about 10% of the variance of adult IQ is explainable by infant IQ, meaning that low-IQ babies can in fact end up with large IQs as adults, which would either indicate that infant cognitive development measures are pretty bad for predicting adult IQ or that it doesn’t matter that much what you do to a baby in the first years of life. There’s also the existence of periods of historical deprivation where babies have been subjected to much worse conditions than during lockdowns, and they didn’t all end up as village idiots like you’d expect from a 2 standard deviation drop. But still, even if most of the effect is going to disappear, something like a 5 point drop in IQ would be a catastrophe, let alone a 30 point one.
Please note that “infant IQ” is a very non-standard use; the article says “ability to process information” instead.
Before three years, things are so difficult to measure that even mental retardation is not diagnosed at that age. I am not surprised by the correlation being low; but from my perspective it simply means “if you try to measure a baby’s mental life, you will get a lot of noise”.
They are probably also pretty bad for predicting IQ at the age of five years.
(I don’t have evidence for this that I could link; it’s just my understanding of how things work.)
One of the reasons is that in people 3 and more years old, we can distinguish between someone being generally smart/slow vs someone having a specific talent/disorder (e.g. “a genius kid with dyslexia”); but a baby does not have a sufficiently wide range of specialized activities to diagnose this.