Are Young Children Falling Behind?

-
Register
Kindergarteners walk down a hallway at school.

Young kids are struggling in school as the long shadow of the pandemic continues to disrupt classrooms. Teachers across the country report young children less able to regulate their emotions and navigate social situations. Attention spans and fine motor skills lag behind grade level. Much of the conversation on school readiness has focused on learning loss. Yet the broader mental health and developmental struggles among some young kids has alarmed early childhood advocates. Theories abound on why the pandemic set young kids back: Parents were massively stressed and children were impacted. Opportunities for building social skills by playing with other kids disappeared. Screen time went through the roof. Kids from poorer families -- and children of color from districts with fewer resources -- are at risk of falling further behind. But despite the deficits, there are grounds for optimism. Researchers emphasize the resilience of young children and suggest that a full recovery is possible — if kids get the resources and support they need. In this webinar, we’ll take a fresh look at the pandemic’s mental health and developmental ripple effects among young children, ask what the latest data and research tells us, and explore opportunities for telling stories sure to resonate in every community. 

This webinar is free and made possible by the Kristy Hammam Fund for Health Journalism.

Panelists

Sara Johnson picture

Sara Johnson, Ph.D., is the Blanket Fort Foundation Professor in Pediatric Population Health and Health Equity Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She also holds joint appointments in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health and the Department of Mental Health in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the director of the Rales Center for the Integration of Health and Education and director of the General Academic Pediatrics Fellowship Program. Her research focuses on understanding the biological and social mechanisms that perpetuate health inequalities across the life course and across generations and ways to interrupt them. In addition, she develops and tests new models of school health to reduce health and educational inequality in Baltimore. She completed her undergraduate degree at UCLA, and her master’s and doctoral degrees in public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Following her doctoral degree, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco and UC Berkeley. 

Alia Wong
Alia Wong is an award-winning journalist based in Washington, D.C., currently serving as the collaborations editor for the Associated Press Education Reporting Network. There, she leads reporting partnerships, coaches journalists and helps to connect newsrooms with data for coverage of a range of education issues. She previously covered inequities in education at USA TODAY, including a long-term project about the pandemic's impacts on young children. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer and associate editor at The Atlantic, where she developed its education section. Born and raised in Hawai‘i, she began her journalism career at Honolulu Civil Beat as a watchdog education reporter. She graduated from Boston University with degrees in journalism and Latin American studies, attending as a Martin Luther King Jr. scholar.


 

Suggested reading

“The Youngest Pandemic Children Are Now in School, and Struggling,” by Claire Cain Miller and Sarah Mervosh, The New York Times

“Pandemic babies are behind after years of stress, isolation affected brain development,” by Alia Wong, USA Today

“Worried your child is delayed from the pandemic? Here’s what experts say to do,” by Alia Wong, USA Today

“How to teach your child to behave, play well with others and overcome pandemic awkwardness,” by Alia Wong, USA Today

“Students Are Making a ‘Surprising’ Rebound From Pandemic Closures. But Some May Never Catch Up.” By Claire Cain Miller, Sarah Mervosh and Francesca Paris, The New York Times

“Socioemotional Development of Infants and Toddlers During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” by Larisa M. Kuehn et al. JAMA Network

“Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic Environment on Early Child Brain and Cognitive Development,” by Sean Deoni, Biological Psychiatry (2022)

“Student Growth in the Post-COVID Era,” via Curriculum Associates

The Educational Opportunity Project, via Stanford University

“Early Correlates of School Readiness Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic Linking Health and School Data,” by Kristen A. Copeland et al., JAMA Network (2024)

“Review: Mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and youth — a systematic review,” by Hasina Samji, et al., Child and Adolescent Mental Health (2021)

“They were babies and toddlers when the pandemic hit. At school, some still struggle.” By Ann Schimke, Chalkbeat Colorado