"How the pandemic may damage children's social intelligence"

 Recently, I read an interesting article wrote by Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, Christelle Langley, Fei Li and Jianfeng Feng entitled "How the pandemic may damage children's social intelligence". The text is about the negative effects of the lack of contact of younger children with their peers and the elderly.

Usually children learn fast and develop skills such as sharing, conflict solving and empathy at a rapid pace. Before pandemia many children used to attend toddler groups or nursery before they started school. So even if they had no siblings, their emotional and social cognition could develop.

I learned that social cognitive development begins in the first year of life, when children begin to develop “theory of mind”, which means understanding what others are thinking, which continues through age five. That is why contact with other people is so important at this age.

Unfortunately during the COVID-19 lockdowns, many opportunities for social learning have been lost.

Social cognition is not only required for success in school and work environments and personal relationships, but also in “hot cognition” in general, which is essentially emotional reasoning taken as a whole. And we know that such cognition is a building block for “cold cognition”, which involves skills such as attention, planning and problem solving.

The authors of the text wrote about the importance of parents ensuring that their children have safe contact with other people, especially other children, as soon as the lockdown ends. They also wrote that governments should also develop special programmes for toddlers and children to help them to gain back the critical period of social brain development that they have lost.

Summarizing: Loneliness is harmful to all age groups. It affects our mental health as well as physical health. However, our brains are still in development until early young adulthood and therefore, the possibility for relearning lost skills may still be possible.