Family and language development during COVID-19: The case of Turkey

With the suspension of daycares and kindergartens, COVID-19 caused temporary yet significant changes in young children’s learning environments around the world. In some countries such as Turkey, however, most young children had been taken care of at home even before the pandemic. Thus, Turkey provides a unique context in which one of the most notable pandemic-related changes for many was the increased presence of the father at home. The study uses language development as an example to (1) provide descriptive information about how COVID-19 affected the learning environment of young children in Turkey, and (2) understand the contributions of mothers and fathers in language learning. We administered a two-part online survey to 133 families with a child at ages 8-36 months. The survey asked the details of the child’s vocabulary level at two times, time spent with the child, and activities they were engaged in. As a proxy of the parental language input, we also asked the parents to write a story about a picture as if they are telling a bedtime story to their child. Our data suggest that the number of words used in the mother’s story, but not the father's story, predicted the vocabulary level of children.