Study: Pandemic Measures Detrimental to Child Development

Simian Practicalist
1 day ago
2 min read

A study by I. Hardie et al titled “COVID-19 public health and social measures (PHSM) and early childhood developmental concerns in Scotland: an interrupted time series analysis” published on 25 November 2025 supports the common observation that the plandemic measures had a bad impact on young children.

The paper is about 12 pages. The study examined child health reviews for children aged 13–15 months and 27–30 months in Scotland between January 2019 and August 2023. In Scotland, PHSM were introduced in March 2020 and removed in August 2021.

This included review records for 186,265 children aged 13–15 months and 186,766 children aged 27–30 months, covering 257,532 individual children.

As expected, the male-female proportion is half and approximately 90% are white.

Although there are large studies from other countries, this was the first population-level study from Europe.

The categories of concern included speech-language-communication, problem solving, emotional-behavioural, amongst others.

Our findings of a +0.091 percentage points per week slope change increase in the proportion of children with any 13–15 month developmental concerns and a +0.076 percentage points per week slope change increase in the proportion of children with any 27–30 month developmental concerns, correspond to an estimated +5.5–6.6 percentage points increase overall when considered in the context of the full 72 weeks of PHSM from March 2020–August 2021.

It should be noted that “the proportion of children with 13–15 month concerns continued to rise even after PHSM were removed in August 2021” whilst 27–30 month developmental concerns stopped increasing but remained higher than pre-plandemic levels.

There is the possibility of bias, that parents and caregivers were more worried during that period. The authors of the paper consider the possibility of bias from the change in mode of review (from in-person to phone). However, one would expect a step-change in the trend rather than the gradual change, suggesting that the concern is genuine.