The Social Distancing and Development Study, 2020-2021

The Social Distancing and Development Study (SDDS) aimed to examine how changes in sleep, parenting style, social interactions, screen use and activities affect young children’s language and cognitive development since the Spring 2020 UK lockdown. This longitudinal study followed a cohort of nearly 900 children aged 8 to 36 months of age, enrolled in an online study at the onset or during the Spring 2020 UK lockdown, to capture changes in their environment and measure their impact on children’s vocabulary size and executive function. Since Spring 2020, we have collected data at three additional timepoints: T2 – End of the Spring 2020 lockdown, T3 – November 2020 lockdown, and T4 – One-year follow-up.On 20th March 2020, the UK Government instigated a nationwide nursery and school closure in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, followed by instructions for people to stay at home. For millions of children, this brought stark changes to their routines, with a decrease in outdoor activities and interactions with others. The environments children grow up in heavily influence key elements of cognitive development such as language and executive functions, which in turn associate with later educational and occupational attainment as well as health and wellbeing. The COVID-19 pandemic is a unique, once-in-a-lifetime situation that has dramatically changed the daily lives of millions of families. Several environmental factors likely to be affected by quarantine measures (such as sleep, parenting style and social interactions, screen use, and outdoor activities/exercise) are known predictors of language and executive function development. The proposed study will follow up a UK-wide cohort of 600 children aged 8 to 36 months of age, enrolled in an online study at the onset of social distancing measures, to capture changes in key environmental variables and measure their impact on children's vocabulary size and executive function. Using sophisticated analyses on a large and diverse sample, we will examine the role of each factor on children's cognitive abilities. At this time of unforeseen and ongoing change, it is imperative to understand the impacts of the lockdown on cognition during a critical period for development (0 to 3 years of age), and then find strategies to minimise disruption to this cohort. Our findings will identify approaches that mitigate the temporary loss of formal early years' education, identify those groups most at risk of adverse consequences, and inform policy on how to remediate the negative impacts of lockdown post-COVID-19.