A Moment with Dr. Moore

The Crisis in Social Skills: Getting Our Children Caught Up

What would be the impact of the COVID pandemic on our youngest learners? The question filled the air at the 2022 Early Educators Leadership Conference, where I joined educators from across the country to see how we could help children advance despite a crisis that forced many centers to close and threatened the children’s development and growth. The level of concern was pretty high, but we received some reassurance from Coy Bowles, a children’s author, advocate for early learning and member of the Grammy Award-winning Zac Brown Band. But his success as a musician wasn’t the legacy he wanted to leave behind, he told the crowd. “At one point in my life, I wanted people to say I was a great musician. Now I want them to say I did everything I could for teachers. I just happened to be a great musician.” And attendees got a taste of his skills on the guitar when he played a song he’d never performed before: Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.

At the time, Coy had just released a social-emotional learning kit based on his hit book, Behind the Little Red Door. And our field can still use Coy’s insights to guide us, according to experts who have explored the pandemic’s toll on our youngest learners. COVID lockdowns and stay-at-home orders may be long gone, but we’re still dealing with the aftermath of all that time we spent separated from one another. And recent research is showing just how much it still affects young children, many of whom lack basic social skills in the classroom.

“These kids are really struggling,” said Nava Silton, a child psychologist at Marymount Manhattan College, as they adapt to being around more people than their families and learning in a group setting. Most people were wearing masks and young children were stuck at home, unable to play with other kids. “They didn’t get the facial cues that we typically get when we interact with others. They couldn’t learn how to take turns or how to regulate their emotions,” Silton said. And social-emotional delays like this were among the concerns expressed last month by Steven Barnett, founder and senior co-director of Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), and a speaker at our EELC in 2024.

Barnett and his colleagues at NIEER have been collecting data since 2020 on how the pandemic affected children’s development and learning, as he explained last month. And their findings led to cause for concern. “Our data shows that parents read less to their kids during the pandemic. And though the level of reading bounced back up, it never came back to where it was before COVID.” Neither have our children’s social and emotional skills, which “tanked during the pandemic,” Barnett pointed out, and children still aren’t as good at getting along with others as they were before COVID led to a long stretch of social isolation and remote learning for children.

“There’s still way more screen time than anyone recommends for young children,” Barnett said, “and the converse of that is there’s way less outdoor time. That’s a problem. If kids are outdoors less, and on screens more, then wouldn’t we think they would have fewer experiences playing with other kids? These are things we had been monitoring nationwide, and we know they have consequences for kids’ development and learning,” Barnett warned. And a new study from the University of California, Merced, also put a focus on how the pandemic—with its school closings, cancelled playdates and lockdowns—made a lasting impact on young children’s social cognition.

At the heart of the study lies the concept of false belief understanding, a skill that allows children to recognize that others can hold beliefs that differ from their own. False belief understanding, as the study explained, is a crucial step in distinguishing thoughts from facts, and it plays a key role in fostering cooperation, communication and learning. Understanding that someone else might not know what you know, for instance, enables children to better manage social interactions. Without this ability, tasks like sharing, taking turns and resolving conflicts become harder. And the decline in young learners’ false belief understanding since the start of the pandemic could have enduring effects, according to Rose Scott, a professor of developmental psychology and the study’s lead author.

Current research shows that false belief abilities mainly develop during a child’s first years. Falling behind in this area can lead to struggles with peer connections and academic studies later in life, Scott warned. “Think about what a child needs to do to interact with others in a classroom. They want to have friends but have to take other perspectives into consideration to have effective social interactions.” For a child, this means understanding, for example that “I know you want to play with this toy now, but I really want to play with it, too,” Scott explained. “False belief understanding is being able to hold those two viewpoints in mind and still interact,” as many children are now unable to do.

The decline has put an added burden on our early childhood teachers in recent years as children have returned to kindergarten and preschool nationwide. So, many schools and child care programs are striving to meet students’ extra needs. They’ve provided more teacher training or hired new staff to work with children who hit, bite or throw tantrums. Programs devote more class time to building social-emotional skills and call in mental health specialists when crises erupt in the classroom.

Still, a shortage of therapists who work with young children, high turnover among educators and a shortage of funding for the early learning field are stunting efforts to help children recover. “The demands on preschool teachers and child care workers have grown even as their resources have shrunk,” said Lori Ganz, clinical director of The Resource Exchange, which provides early childhood services around the area of El Paso County, Texas. “Classrooms are larger, the children are more challenging and some days, teachers just can’t do it.”

You can see why educators feel burned out when you hear stories like the one that came from Erin Perry, the mom of a four-year-old boy in the town of Eagle, Colorado. Perry said teachers at her son’s child care center talked of disturbing behavior post-COVID that they’d never seen before, and she saw what they meant when her son became one of the victims. When he was two, as Perry recalled, one teacher was responsible for shadowing a toddler in the class who constantly acted out. The teacher was being responsible and paying attention, but when she turned her back for a moment, the toddler bit Perry’s son hard enough to draw blood.

And this type of alarming behavior isn’t unique to toddlers, explained Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association. “We are talking about four- and five-year-olds who are throwing chairs, biting and hitting, without any self-regulation,” he said. And Lisa Rourke, an educator in St. Augustine, Florida, has witnessed similar chaos in her preschool classroom of three- to five-year olds, many of whom now can’t seem to regulate their emotions. Since the pandemic, “they’re knocking over chairs, throwing things, hitting their peers and hitting their teachers,” Rourke said. And this lack of self-control means “they’re coming in and they don’t know how to play” added Brook Allen, a kindergarten teacher in Martin, Tennessee, who had never seen children act this way during her more than 10 years in the classroom.

And this lack of social skills poses a grim challenge, according to 40 early educators in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, who joined a roundtable discussion last November with Coy Bowles and Pam Cho, vice president of Early Learning Resource Center in Hamilton, who pointed to the issues teachers faced as they served children post-pandemic. “There’s a crisis situation in the field of early childhood education with children as young as three years old being suspended or expelled from programs. We’re seeing lots of children with different kinds of behaviors—some with diagnoses, others without diagnoses—and it really has created a burden for the provider community,” she said. And Shelly Feller, program manager of Unconditional Child Care at Pinebrook Family Answers, echoed Cho’s concerns. “Classrooms that may have had one or two challenging behaviors before now have possibly six, seven, eight in a classroom of fifteen.”

So, early childhood programs in Lehigh Vally are doing what they can to lighten the load. Cho discussed a state grant that her program had received for a rapid response team that partners with parents, providers and community resource groups on ways to help children remain in school. Jessika Nasatka, vice president of early education and child care at Lehigh Valley Children’s Centers, spoke about classroom strategies to address behavior issues, such as areas for small group activities and use of sensory items to calm the children down. Other recommendations from the group included more professional training for teachers and small mental health breaks for them throughout the day—all ideas that met with Bowles’ support.

He encouraged the educators to continue their work and to combat the roadblocks they faced head on. “If we as a collective keep showing up and we keep aiming for thriving and if we keep having conversations like this,” he said, “I think we have hope.” And experts like Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a neuroscientist at Rutgers Medical School, agreed. It will take time and resources, she acknowledged, but “we can get children caught up.”

So, we must conduct more research studies like those I have described, continue to track our children’s progress and discover more ways to ramp up their social skills. And it’s worth the work since there’s a lot at stake for our children’s future. “Beginning early in life, social and emotional learning is crucial in helping children to understand how to manage their emotions, feel and show empathy for others, establish healthy relationships, make reasonable decisions and set positive goals,” as Bowles has pointed out. Social and emotional skills are essential for long-term success in school and life. Our children must know how to make friends and engage with others if they are going to be alright.