Yeah this doesn’t surprise me. In school I had to do developmental testing on a child and the parents in question were very proud of them never having been in daycare and also as a result never getting sick. I could almost visualize the wheels turning in the parent’s head when they realized the child was slightly behind in language and that daycare actually significantly socializes children. It’s not a replacement for parenting, but few things in life have the decency to be neatly black and white.
You hit on kind of an awkward aspect of this study. IQ is a somewhat overvalued logocentric measure itself, but it isn’t surprising that kids with less contact with peers and other adults would be at a disadvantage for that form of testing. Another thing is that, even though development occurs along regular lines with recognizable milestones, there is a great deal of variability in when kids actually cross them (not to mention that cognitive development is not all there is to the picture). IQ is a pretty narrow interpretation of development, especially if we are talking about toddlers.
What is annoying about this reporting is that it makes some pretty general inferences from an IQ measure–the sample size is OK but the population is limited. I have only skimmesd the actual article, but I wonder if they noted like others have before about the effects of increased screen time.
Yeah this doesn’t surprise me. In school I had to do developmental testing on a child and the parents in question were very proud of them never having been in daycare and also as a result never getting sick. I could almost visualize the wheels turning in the parent’s head when they realized the child was slightly behind in language and that daycare actually significantly socializes children. It’s not a replacement for parenting, but few things in life have the decency to be neatly black and white.
You hit on kind of an awkward aspect of this study. IQ is a somewhat overvalued logocentric measure itself, but it isn’t surprising that kids with less contact with peers and other adults would be at a disadvantage for that form of testing. Another thing is that, even though development occurs along regular lines with recognizable milestones, there is a great deal of variability in when kids actually cross them (not to mention that cognitive development is not all there is to the picture). IQ is a pretty narrow interpretation of development, especially if we are talking about toddlers.
What is annoying about this reporting is that it makes some pretty general inferences from an IQ measure–the sample size is OK but the population is limited. I have only skimmesd the actual article, but I wonder if they noted like others have before about the effects of increased screen time.