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.
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.