Six years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and new research suggests that more Canadian kindergartners are facing developmental vulnerabilities following some of the longest school closures in the world.
Researchers from the Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster University collected data from more than 540,000 children across the country both before (2017-2020) and after the pandemic (2020-2023).
The researchers used what’s known as the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a 103-item questionnaire completed by teachers, to get a read on how kids were doing. The tool spans five key developmental domains, including physical health and well being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive development, and communication skills and general knowledge.
The data suggest that, overall, there was a rise in developmental vulnerability rates from 27.3 per cent to 28.5 per cent. The report defines that vulnerability as a child whose EDI scores on any domain fall below the lowest 10th percentile. Among children with special needs, there was a 2.5 per cent increase in developmental vulnerability.
Magdalena Janus, a professor at the department of pediatrics at the University of British Columbia who oversaw the research during her time at the department of psychiatry and behavioural neurosciences at McMaster, said that although these increases may seem marginal, they represent thousands more children facing developmental challenges every day.
“Considering that these children really struggle with some aspects of development, and the common knowledge is that the support services are inadequate as it is right now, having that small increase filtering through their grades and through their academic trajectory is really a bit of a warning sign for education and social services,” she said in an interview with CTV News Toronto.
Emotional maturity showed the largest increase after the pandemic, rising from 13.3 to 14.5 per cent. Increases in hyperactive behaviours and challenges in attention and concentration were also observed.
In one of two reports published as part of the research, the authors described the disruptive nature of school closures, which they point out were the longest in Ontario at 20 weeks. Although these public health measures had “positive effects” in blunting the spread of the virus, the effects on Canada’s young children were “significant.”
“These public health measures disrupted many of the resources and supports that were typically available to children, and in some cases, rendered them completely unavailable,” one report read.
Children in lowest-income neighbourhoods twice as likely to be developmentally vulnerable
The research also looked at the role of socioeconomic factors in a child’s early development.
It found that children in the lowest income neighbourhoods were twice as likely to be at risk of a developmental vulnerability compared to those in highest-income neighbourhoods. Janus suggested that may be explained by limited access to recreational resources, parents who work two jobs to make ends meet, or a lack of nutritious food or stable housing.
“There’s much more children who have developmental vulnerability on the lower end of a socioeconomic spectrum, and your socioeconomic indices are proxies for those particular factors like food insecurity, housing, and parental education,” she said.
Moreover, the research in children with special needs found that although there was a larger population of boys who were developmentally vulnerable compared to girls, the percentage increase among the latter group was larger.
“Rates rose by just over one percentage point for boys, but by more than four percentage points for girls. This suggests that girls with special needs may have been more affected by pandemic-related disruptions than boys,” the researchers wrote in an op-ed published earlier this month, a phenomenon Janus admits researchers are still trying to understand.
“What we know is that girls tend to be underdiagnosed, so you know there is a big gap in terms of percentages,” she explained, adding that some girls may not have been diagnosed during the pandemic because of limited access to in-person medical services.
What happens next?
Janus said that the data should serve as a wake-up call for educators, specifically those who teach kindergarten, who may have observed an increase in developmental vulnerabilities themselves.
She said a long-term solution could involve more specialized training for teachers to understand what those vulnerabilities look like. As well, she said a better understanding is required of the potential consequences that can arise if those vulnerabilities aren’t addressed early on, which the report says could “increase the burden” on the country’s education and health-care systems.
“I hate to say that, because it’s like pushing responsibility on teachers, and they already have to deal with a lot, but they get the first gateway very often in recognizing that something is not quite right.”
