The Pandemic Effect on IQ
A 2022 study out of the United States has shown children born during the coronavirus pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor and overall cognitive performance compared with children born before Covid-19. Where else in the world would you expect this type of study than America?
The first few years of a child’s life are critical to cognitive development. But with Covid-19 triggering the closure of businesses, nurseries, schools and playgrounds, life for infants changed considerably, with parents stressed and stretched as they attempted to balance work and childcare. Some even lost their livelihood and, subsequently, their income and even homes.
As an educator and developmental psychologist, I witnessed the sense of emergency that schools operated under stress to unfold quicker than any other industry in response to the pandemic. Large urban school districts purchased millions of chromebooks and the requisite technological portals to maintain communication between schools, students, and their families.
But, despite the massive undertaking by the U.S. Department of Education, students starting school missed out on the basic foundational skills that lead to a more robust cognitive foundation. My own children are contemporaries of the group of students who were looked at in the study.
The study included 672 children from the state of Rhode Island. Of these, 188 were born after July 2020 and 308 were born prior to January 2019, while 176 were born between January 2019 and March 2020. The children included in the study were born full-term, had no developmental disabilities and were mostly white. The falling scores were attributed to the lack of stimulation and interaction at home and school. Those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds fared even worse in the tests, so one can only imagine what happened to the scores of children whose families lost their jobs, homes, and foundation for living.
In psychology, we refer to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a model when it comes to understanding the motivations of human behavior. In his initial paper and a subsequent 1954 book titled Motivation and Personality, Maslow proposed that five core needs form the basis for human behavioral motivation. It’s well known that if you lack the basic foundational physiological needs at the bottom of the pyramid, the more high-level, intangible needs at the top will not be achieved or actualized. After air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, and reproduction, we need personal security, employment, resources, property, and our health which many of us lost in the pandemic. After these basic needs, we need friendship, intimacy, family, and a sense of connection and, during Covid lockdowns, we were forced to do without these relationships and many of us suffered from depression, fear of loss, and anxiety. According to Maslow, without these relationships, we cannot flourish in our own self-esteem, status, recognition, personal strength, and freedom and without these qualities, we lack the desire to self-actualize and become the most that we can be.
Whether these lower cognitive scores from the study will have a long-term impact is unclear. In the first few years of life, the foundations for cognition are laid, much like building a house where it’s easier and more substantial to add additional rooms when you have a solid foundation. But if your foundation has not been laid, it’s improbable that an individual will succeed, much less thrive in their cognitive development.
This is all to say, with every setback, there is likely an outlier. For instance, some of my students with autism did very well, even exceeding academic goals during the pandemic. The reasons were because of the preferential way their education was delivered virtually and their already deficient social skills were not considered or identified as an issue when working from the comfort of a familiar setting at home. They excelled because their deficient social skills were not needed while working virtually.
Given this data comes from a relatively affluent part of the United States, where social support and unemployment benefits are generous, the fear is that things could be worse in poorer parts of the country and the world. The key factor influencing these lower scores in infants has likely been due to the stress on parents who faced challenges in both working and providing full-time attentive childcare. As a parent, I am widely aware of the cost of childcare and am grateful that my boys were old enough to attend preschool and kindergarten during the pandemic. But it was never easy as we were all living, schooling, and working in close quarters with overlapping schedules and increasing demands while the stress of staying safe and simply getting by became readily transparent into the second and third years of the pandemic.
I have a saying for my children that “despite what life hands you, we never give up.” During the first year of lockdowns, I channeled my inner survival skills and took the time I had together with my boys to learn new skills, develop quality connections, and become more adaptive and resilient to everyday setbacks. I watched seasons of the program, Alone, sometimes with my boys to learn how to survive in the wilderness with very little equipment and outdoor gear. I pitched a family tent in the living room of my 2 bedroom English basement in the Ledroit Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C. We slept, read, played games, and ate dinners out of our tent and made weekly trips to our local garden plot to tend to our squash, kale, and tomatoes. We cooked meals and played music at our firepit and sunbathed in our baby pool in the terrace behind our home. We scooted and skateboarded around the neighborhood for exercise. We went camping into the woods and applied the skills we learned at home. We learned how to adapt and stay safe despite the demands of the global pandemic. As a result, we grew closer as a family unit and, in many ways, learned how to thrive given all the unforeseen circumstances. Until this day, and despite my own struggles of contracting Covid three times, I am thankful for the opportunity, although extremely difficult, to live, learn, and grow through what will likely be considered the most difficult time for anyone alive today.
I attribute the success of thriving in and after the pandemic with two children to manifesting our future by living as optimally as possible given the limitations. We were all faced with restrictions and guidelines that seemed impossible and, although not ideal, we were forced to adapt. In psychology, you can’t look at intelligence without looking at adaptive skills. You could be the most intelligent human on paper, but have less developed adaptive skills and, in life, this happens as psychologists often see extremely high cognitive scores with very low living or social skills scores.
In another study, researchers assessed the intelligence test scores of students in the 7th and 9th grade secondary school settings during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and student samples assessed in 2002. Between August and September 2020, 424 pupils in the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades answered the Berlin Structure-of-Intelligence Test (BIS-HB). In four German grammar schools in Rhineland-Palatine, these pupils attended either regular or special classes. The sample cohort had an average age of 13.34 years with 41.98% female students. In July 2021, 257 students with an assessed IQ score at the initial measurement point were retested. All intelligence scales, except for creativity, displayed large structural coefficients showing that the 2002 sample performed significantly better than the 2020 sample. Why might that be?
Why was creativity the outlier and how did students continue to do well in this area despite the challenges of Covid-19. Creativity happens to be one area of intelligence that is not measured as it is a more abstract, non-linear, immeasurable trait that is also perceptually and developmentally based. The results imply that COVID-19-related issues may affect the cognitive capacities of children, but not in the area of creativity.
So, can one be creative despite the challenges of lacking in the foundation of Maslow’s Hiearchy of Needs? The levels in order after physiological needs are safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization needs. One could argue that creativity is not so much a need as trait or characteristic of an individual that transcends the need of basic human needs. In fact, we need creativity to survive. If you don’t have a knife or a weapon in the wilderness, you have to make one out of a stick and rocks. If you don’t have a fishing rod available, you make one out of bamboo and willow or ivy. The essence of creativity is the creation of something that doesn’t exist and using that which it is and not what it necessarily intended to be. It is innovation, invention, and motivation combined, which is arguably more important and applicable than cognitive intelligence.
I spoke of invention and how necessity is the mother of invention in an episode of my Novel Brain podcast. This is the notion that dates back to the Socratic dialogue in ‘Republic,’ where Plato famously wrote, “our need will be the real creator.” In other words, new ways to do things are found or created when there is a strong and specific \need for them. In other words, when we are forced to find ways to do new things, creative types will find new and innovative ways to go about living and those who thrive will do this while being given more limitations.
Ultimately, my point of this article was to highlight a sort of non-Flynn effect, where fluid and crystallized intelligence has collectively risen a few points every year. My argument is that intelligence in the formal sense of testing is not the only or best measure of one’s intelligence for that matter. It is a measure of a kind of intelligence with several components, but it does not measure basic survival or, more precisely, creative intelligence.
Creative intelligence could be attested to components that still need to be developed. As I’ve said numerous times throughout my career, intelligence testing is not used to identify the most adaptable and inventive people, but rather a formal measure of components that make up a person’s abilities involved in thinking. They estimate a person’s potential to use mental processes to solve problems or to acquire new knowledge. But, they don’t accurately measure how well an individual will survive, adapt, or become resilient to change.
Despite my formal training in cognitive testing and developmental neuropsychology, I’ve always been more from the school that emotional intelligence is the sail for the cognitive intelligence wheel. In our modern world, we measure cognitive intelligence to imply some individuals are better fit to do certain tasks. But, we tend to overlook what emotional intelligence provides in the form of motivation to progress. Ultimately, one’s cognitive intelligence keeps a ship on track, but their emotional intelligence provides the fuel to get them there.
Through a global pandemic, it’s best to have both and, if you only have the ship, you’re not going to get very far. If there’s anything we can all learn from living through Covid-19, it is that we need creativity, community, and cognitive abilities for survival. If only our current educational models could adapt to this philosophy, I believe we could see real change and growth in our youth and their ability to navigate into an ever-evolving world of changes. This is why I continue to teach my children and the children I work with the importance of expressing themselves creatively with no boundaries. Providing the tools and the canvas is the first step to a beautiful painting. We can learn from the pandemic and apply what we have found when we approach other problems like climate change, social injustice, and other global issues like world hunger, poverty, and even war. Teach your children the boundless mentality and watch them flourish with solutions to some of the worst atrocities known to humankind. If we can get to this growth mindset in education, parenting, and community, the efforts are not only possible, they are boundless and infinite.
