Research question:
What has caused an increase in speech delay in children and how have COVID-19 emotional, physical, behavioral, and social factors significantly impacted this increase?
My interest in this topic started about three years ago. I personally have a little brother who is currently 5 years old. He has very little speech development. Before the pandemic, I really did not see any other kids like him. I thought that we were one of the only families that were going through this. But in the past 3 years, I have been noticing more children like this. Besides being interested in it because my brother is special to me, I find it very interesting and would like to know what actually led to this, for him and for other children. I think that cognitive development is very important during early ages and we should pay attention to those things, and even more if we see an increase in them. Also having in mind that the pandemic was a hard time for a lot of people we should also consider how that affected the early development of children. What I expect to find in my research is that isolation and low social interactions during the pandemic definitely had an impact on children’s speech development. Also the way the consumption of media and technology delayed speech.
