What parent hasn’t felt this grim determination at some point during the marathon that is modern, village-less childrearing? I instantly fell in love with this statue on a visit to Moscow (en route to the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic to visit a physics lab under a mountain). I can’t seem to find any information about the sculpture or sculptor, and though it has some stylistic features of propaganda art, I choose to take my inspiration where I can find it.
This week, I encountered a tweet that claimed “The CDC just quietly lowered the standards for speech in early childhood development. Now children should know ~50 words at 30mo rather than 24mo. Instead of highlighting the harmful effects masks and lockdowns have had on children, the CDC just lowered the bar for milestones.” Tens of thousands uncritically amplified the tweet and added to the outrage, but it only took a minute or two to find the real story, if you were actually interested.
I do admit, I was most suspicious of it as fake news because anyone who knows the arena of child development research knows that kind of fast reaction time—from awarding grants into research on pandemic effects on child development, to conducting that research, to publishing it, and then to seeing policy change—just doesn’t happen.
It turns out the former milestones were based on the median ages when children achieve them. So if your child turns two and doesn’t know 50 words, they might still be roughly average and on a perfectly normal development path. But you could be forgiven for being concerned that they don’t seem to meet the CDC standards. Very sensibly, the CDC has changed their milestones to represent what children above the bottom quartile have achieved by that age, so when you miss a milestone you know you should be following up, to rule out any problems.
In other words, the new milestones are clinically meaningful in a way the old ones weren’t. The Twitter outrage was directed at entirely sensible policy decisions. I think of the mother in the statue above and how she doesn’t need another reason to worry about her kids. Some of the women I met on that trip to Moscow have sons in military service—a mandatory duty for young men. Those mothers have more than enough to worry about this week.
Thanks, Jessa! I’ve been meaning to respond to your post. The CDC’s change reminds me of the laughable moment in college when the health coordinator in our dorm–the student who got some version of room and board for stocking the bathroom with condoms and tampons & leading discussions on managing stress–quietly took down the sign in the bathroom that read something like: “Most women at X college, consume 2 drinks per evening out” and taped up a new one with the number updated to 3. Such a curious number. Such a curious change. Who was counting anyway, and why? I don’t think anyone really ever believed those numbers could capture the reality of women at X college.
But any time a change is made in relation to children, people do pay attention. People react! As the mother of a three-year-old with a speech delay, I know the reality of what he knows and expresses is much more complicated than anything that can be stated in a metric & the reasons doubly so–pandemic or no pandemic. Just before he turned three, he spoke without consonants. If he wanted to tell me about sawing wood at forest school, he’d say some version of “Ooooahhhh….eeeehhh….eeeeehhh,” and wipe his hand across his chest. But at 3 1/2, we look at a page in a children’s book, and he tells me he sees an “oval,” and if I ask what color the oval is, he says, “purple.” “Purple oval.”
How mysterious — were they hoping you all would pace yourselves accordingly, I wonder? Do they assume people want to be average in their drinking? There are those programs where the electricity company tells you how you compare to your neighbours’ energy usage and they’ve found it makes people lower their own usage in competition, but I’m not sure which way this one would work.
And ‘purple oval’ is basically a tongue twister, so right on. I don’t know who counts the words their kids know, anyway, so I imagine people apply those milestones in a hand-wavy way in the end. Like, oh he’s supposed to know 30 words? Well, he’s non-verbal, so that’s less than 30. When I was at that stage of parenting I think it was emphasized that comprehension is the thing, whereas expression is just so variable from kid to kid.
Interesting article. Thanks for digging deeper for the actual story. But I’m puzzled. My now grown “kids” were both chatterboxes at an early age, so it never would have occurred to me to count their words. But if it had, I wouldn’t have been looking to the CDC. Since when did the CDC track such milestones? How is this related to disease? I’m looking at CDC Mission Statement and its History (as provided by Wikipedia) and I just don’t get it. Fodder for another post, perhaps?