REVIEWING CHILD DEVELOPMENT DURING PANDEMIC

Child development is the foundational and unique aspect, leading to transformations in various abilities. There are several factors, like genetics, nutrition, environment, etc., which put an impact on the process of development. Apart from these, certain extraneous factors like rising terrorist activities, wars, and pandemics also greatly impact the development of a child. Several pandemics or epidemics have adverse effect on the development of children, such as “The development of children who were exposed to the Asian influenza pandemic in 1957, while in utero, was hampered with evidence of poor cognitive development”. The adversities of such effects can also be observed where “The 1918 Spanish flu has resulted in lower educational attainment for those individuals whose mothers had potential in-utero exposure”. Moreover, other studies on the impact of various pandemics or health-related disasters (SARS, H1N1) depict a correlation between the enhanced level of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress level in school-aged children, adolescents, and young adults who were directly affected (Ko, Yen, Yen, & Yang, 2006; Main, Zhou, Ma, Luecken, Liu, 2011; Sprang & Silman, 2013). These studies highlight that the pandemic had a long-term negative impact on the generations, in the development process of a child. So, these necessities need to know the impact of another pandemic, which hit the ground in 2020, on child development. Child development is multidimensional as it deals with physical, cognitive, linguistic, and socio-emotional development. But the focus of this paper is to study the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Child Development, especially concerning skills in three domains i.e., Cognitive, Affective (Socio-emotional), and Psychomotor, where, the cognitive domain includes mental skills, the affective domain includes the skills associated with emotional development, and the psychomotor domain encompasses the physical skills. The study, to know the impact is done through the review of studies taken from the following databases Google Scholar, JSTOR, and ResearchGate. KEYWORDS: Child Development, Cognitive Development, Socio-emotional Development, Psychomotor Development, Impact of Pandemic.