Posted On: Monday - June 2nd 2025 6:49PM MST
In Topics: Kung Flu Stupidity
This post is sort of timely. I don't write that due to our many dozens of posts about all types of Kung Flu PanicFest madness having come out fast and furious 5 years ago. It happens that I wrote a comment under the very last post in reply to Adam Smith with an anecdote (of mine) about not taking a doctor's worries about my boy's slightly late speech development seriously. Then, I had a conversation with a lady who told me that her boy was one of the Kovid Kids. She was referring to speech development problems.
Our full disclosure policy says I should add that this kid has some other minor problem with his tongue (longer on one side than the other). I dunno. However, she brought up the problem of speech development in "the Kovid Kids". At 6 y/o now, he is considered a Kovid Kid.
What? I'd never before heard of the term. However, 5 years ago Peak Stupidity posted discussion about possible problems for children we might see in the future due to the ubiquitous face-masking.* Oops, it's the future now. My post was one of a 12-parter: Scenes from the Kung Flu Summer re-Panic - Part 6.
If you recognize this and the next picture - they're in reverse order from the original post - you have a great memory. The Kung Flu's been bery bery good to you. Remember the times - parents, well, the Kung Flu Kompliant ones - would wear face masks while pushing their little ones in the baby carriage. I don't want to remember if they put any masks on the babies - toddlers had 'em. Here's what I wrote then, 4.8 years back:
Can you imagine what the little ones are thinking, though? If you are a 2 y/o toddler, you may have solid memories only going back 1/2 a year or so. You will think this is the way the world has always been. Adults don't show their noses and mouths in public, in the same way that they don't show their pee-pee's and ass-cracks... OK, well, some of them. If this goes on for, well what will it be, another year, two(?), what kind of impression of the world will this be?I didn't think about speech development. Look, if they pay me to do Developmental Psychology here, I'll do Developmental Psychology here, going forward. The thought that babies may learn how to talk by reading lips is an interesting one though.
The kid on the right below might have an obsession with not showing his face when he grows up. He may have the same dreams about leaving his face mask at home, you know, like those dreams where you go to the office and realize you forgot to put your pants and underwear on. (Usually it's just the pants, unless it's one of THOSE dreams... with Ivanka working in the same cube as me ... Jared is my reporting manager with his web cam... we've all probably had this one ...)
First, one must get over the idea that when children are too young to talk, it's because they wouldn't know what to say. I really thought that until some examples taught me otherwise. No, they might know perfectly well what words they want to say by some age, but they cannot get their lips, mouth, and throat to make said words.
Moving on from that, I'd figured that children just try all different things with their lips/mouths/throats until they get closer and closer to the sound they want to make. That's trial and error learning. This idea about their learning how to make sounds by reading the lips of others speaking to them is pretty cool. I don't know if it's right - they don't even pay me to go on the internet and ...
OK, fine. I've found lots of blurbs based on the search "children learning to speak by lip reading". One of them is Science! News, but not knowing the political aspirations of that publications, I went to Speech Buddy to read this interesting article. It refers to a study by one David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic U. (Nice spot!) Keep in mind here, English is all the children's family language - fancy that! - as they watch videos of women speaking to them in English and Spanish:
When the speaker used English, the four-month-olds gazed mostly into her eyes. The six-month-olds looked at the eyes and the mouth equally. Interestingly, the eight and 10-month-olds studied mostly the mouth while the 12-month-olds, started shifting their attention back towards the speakerโs eyes.How they learn to roll those "r"s is beyond me!
However, when the babies heard Spanish, researchers saw that the 12-month-olds studied the mouth longer- similar to the younger babies. These children struggled to interpret the information and needed the extra clues to make sense of the unfamiliar sounds.
OK, I looked at some more articles, but others also mention the same study from '12 or so, which made this learning-to-speak-by-lip-reading concept a new one only 13 years ago. Really? I'm amazed, because this sounds like the kind of theory that would be very fun and interesting to develop experiments for. Wait, someone did one in '20 too - I almost forgot. They called it the Kung Flu Infotainment PanicFest... well, some of us called it that.
This masking deal was perhaps an inadvertent experiment on speech development, as the real experiment was on compliance with Totalitarianism. The experiment on the children's development is not one I'd think most parents would have voluntarily signed up for, were it advertised by the local university Psyche Dept. "Your kid will spend his first couple of years in a somewhat mother-alienated environment. There will be complimentary Chic-Fil-A gift cards!"
Yet parents all over the place decided they must be part of this experiment, that decision itself being part of an experiment ... very meta. Now there are Kovid Kids, whose speech development has been delayed.
I'm not just basing this post on the experiments mentioned and the one Mom's experience. From My Wellness Hub, well, that's what I came upon, COVID-19โs Silent Impact: Speech Delays in Children:
A Startling Rise in Speech DelaysHere are the factors to which the problems are attributed:
The pandemic has reshaped the landscape of childhood development in ways weโre only beginning to understand. For many little ones, their first words, an eagerly awaited milestone, have been delayed. The data speaks volumes about this emerging challenge. According to the Charlotte Speech and Hearing Center, a notable shift occurred during the pandemic. In pre-pandemic times, they reported a 20% failure rate in speech evaluations among children. However, in the heart of the pandemic, this rate alarmingly rose to 50%, with even higher rates in areas of greater economic challenges.
1) Reduced Social Interaction
2) The Digital Shift: Increased Screen Time
3) (absence of) Outdoor Activities
4) Mask-Wearing and Speech Development
From discussion of (4):
Lastly, the widespread use of masks, while crucial for health and safety, has had unintended consequences for speech development. Masks can muffle sounds and hide facial expressions, both essential cues in learning language and communication. For young children, seeing the movement of lips and facial expressions is a critical part of understanding speech and language.Yeah, understanding these factors... lots of us intuitively understood these factors 5 years ago, during the PanicFest! We were told to shut up and put a mask on.
Understanding these factors is essential in addressing the developmental needs of our children during these challenging times.
Strategies for Parents and CaregiversYou want a conversation? You can't handle a conversation! We tried to tell you that you were panicking and to calm the hell down. We asked you to have perspective and note that no commandeered Fed-Ex vans were driving around calling out on a P/A "Bring out yer dead!" We pointed out that no kids from the school were hospitalized or we'd have all heard about it and kept our kids home, attendance policy be damned. We listened to your worries and found you steeped in stupidity and overly compliant under Totalitarianism.
Embrace the Power of Conversation ...
We
PS: It sounds like the boy in question is a very bright kid and will do fine.
* We had a whole 5-part series called March Mask Madness, but the post in question here wasn't one of those.
Comments:
Adam Smith
Tuesday - June 3rd 2025 12:04PM MST
PS: Good afternoon, Achmed!
๐ผ ๐กโ๐๐๐ ๐ฆ๐๐ข'๐ฃ๐ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ ๐ข๐ ๐กโ๐๐ก ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐...
Nope. I just downloaded it today for the first time.
(Never noticed it available before.)
Seems like the kind of thing some of our fellow Peakers might like. And digital copies are always handy for the Ctrl-F search function and for copy/paste if you'd like to quote something for a blog post.
But yes. Time to get outside. Too beautiful not to. Cheers! โฎ๏ธ
๐ผ ๐กโ๐๐๐ ๐ฆ๐๐ข'๐ฃ๐ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ ๐ข๐ ๐กโ๐๐ก ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐...
Nope. I just downloaded it today for the first time.
(Never noticed it available before.)
Seems like the kind of thing some of our fellow Peakers might like. And digital copies are always handy for the Ctrl-F search function and for copy/paste if you'd like to quote something for a blog post.
But yes. Time to get outside. Too beautiful not to. Cheers! โฎ๏ธ
Moderator
Tuesday - June 3rd 2025 11:46AM MST
PS: I think you've given us that one before, Adam, but thanks for a guaranteed updated link. Been writing all over the place today. Gotta get outside!!
Peak Stupidity Book Club
Tuesday - June 3rd 2025 8:56AM MST
PS: Good morning, everyone...
Noticing by Steve Sailer (2.7mb .pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/4p7w7kd6
https://files.catbox.moe/4rllpy.pdf
Happy Tuesday! โฎ๏ธ
Noticing by Steve Sailer (2.7mb .pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/4p7w7kd6
https://files.catbox.moe/4rllpy.pdf
Happy Tuesday! โฎ๏ธ
Moderator
Tuesday - June 3rd 2025 8:28AM MST
PS: In fairness to Steve Sailer on that, child development is not one of his interests either.
Moderator
Tuesday - June 3rd 2025 5:26AM MST
PS: "Astonishing phenomenon? โฆ.no, it seems perfectly reasonable now that I think about it. I wonder what the longitudinal further studies will show in terms of the effects upon brain wiring that, in many cases, were resistant to rewiring."
About those longitudinal studies. Those take some dedication and/or steady funding. Steve Sailer (got the dedication if not the funding) would normally do something like this, but then, he don't wanna' know...
Kudos to Doctor Makary. I have not been a TV watcher since 5 x longer back than that period, so I missed that. Trump is doing a MUCH BETTER job in picking people for the Fed bureaucracy leadership.
About those longitudinal studies. Those take some dedication and/or steady funding. Steve Sailer (got the dedication if not the funding) would normally do something like this, but then, he don't wanna' know...
Kudos to Doctor Makary. I have not been a TV watcher since 5 x longer back than that period, so I missed that. Trump is doing a MUCH BETTER job in picking people for the Fed bureaucracy leadership.
SafeNow
Tuesday - June 3rd 2025 12:24AM MST
PS
Astonishing phenomenon? โฆ.no, it seems perfectly reasonable now that I think about it. I wonder what the longitudinal further studies will show in terms of the effects upon brain wiring that, in many cases, were resistant to rewiring.
During the panic period, Hopkins Doc Marty Makary was a regular guest on the War Street Journal Editorial Report, a 1-hour weekend tv program. (Trump recently appointed him to head the FDA. ) Makary was a magnificent voice of non-propaganda Covid information. I remember one appearance that is relevant to the subject of this essay. It concerned the covid risk to young children. The government had recently released data illuminating the fact that 523 infants had recently contracted a severe case of Covid. Aha, the government said..YuhSee..infants can get a bad case of Covid. Implication: Weโd better protect themโฆparents should mask-up.
Makary: The govt stopped there, but we here at Hopkins wanted to know if there was something about those 523. We dug deeper. It turned-out that these 523 all had a comorbidity that had rendered them susceptible. to the bad case. ALL of them.
I am doing this from memory but I have a pretty good memory.
The above reminds me of how the government used a handful of bizarre, special cases of outdoor transmission to wildly wildly wildly extrapolate to a claim that, YuhSee!โฆ outdoor transmission does pose a risk.
Astonishing phenomenon? โฆ.no, it seems perfectly reasonable now that I think about it. I wonder what the longitudinal further studies will show in terms of the effects upon brain wiring that, in many cases, were resistant to rewiring.
During the panic period, Hopkins Doc Marty Makary was a regular guest on the War Street Journal Editorial Report, a 1-hour weekend tv program. (Trump recently appointed him to head the FDA. ) Makary was a magnificent voice of non-propaganda Covid information. I remember one appearance that is relevant to the subject of this essay. It concerned the covid risk to young children. The government had recently released data illuminating the fact that 523 infants had recently contracted a severe case of Covid. Aha, the government said..YuhSee..infants can get a bad case of Covid. Implication: Weโd better protect themโฆparents should mask-up.
Makary: The govt stopped there, but we here at Hopkins wanted to know if there was something about those 523. We dug deeper. It turned-out that these 523 all had a comorbidity that had rendered them susceptible. to the bad case. ALL of them.
I am doing this from memory but I have a pretty good memory.
The above reminds me of how the government used a handful of bizarre, special cases of outdoor transmission to wildly wildly wildly extrapolate to a claim that, YuhSee!โฆ outdoor transmission does pose a risk.
The whole COVID..........fraud? grift?..............
No.............Crime, was the most insidious, evil thing I have ever witnessed in my life.
Yes, and that includes the wars that have happened during that time.
It was an attempt to literally enslave the entire World and isolate people from thier family, friends, and fellow human beings.
No hole is too deep or too dark for those who orchestrated it.