The effects of social distancing policies on children's language development, sleep and executive functions.

于二零二零年三月二十日，英国政府为应对COVID-19爆发而在全国范围内关闭幼儿园及学校，并指示人们留在家中。对于数百万儿童来说，这给他们的日常生活带来了巨大的变化，户外活动和与他人的互动减少了。儿童成长的环境严重影响了认知发展的关键因素，如语言和执行功能，这反过来又与以后的教育和职业成就以及健康和福祉相关。COVID-19大流行是一种独特的、千载难逢的情况，极大地改变了数百万家庭的日常生活。检疫措施可能影响的几个环境因素（如睡眠、父母教养方式和社交互动、屏幕使用和户外活动/锻炼）是语言和执行功能发展的已知预测因素。这项拟议的研究将随访英国范围内的600名8至36个月大的儿童，这些儿童在社交距离措施开始时参加了一项在线研究，捕捉关键环境变量的变化，并衡量它们对儿童词汇量和执行功能的影响。通过对大量不同样本的复杂分析，我们将研究每个因素对儿童认知能力的作用。在这个不可预见和持续变化的时期，必须了解在发育的关键时期（0至3岁）封锁对认知的影响，然后找到策略来尽量减少对这一群体的干扰。我们的研究结果将确定减轻早期正规教育暂时损失的方法，确定最有可能遭受不利后果的群体，并为政策提供信息，以补救COVID-19后封锁的负面影响。

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.