{"id":1905,"date":"2025-02-21T09:58:31","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T08:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/2025\/02\/21\/diferencias-desarrollo-infantil-covid-19-mexico-costa-rica-2\/"},"modified":"2026-10-26T08:36:04","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T07:36:04","slug":"diferencias-desarrollo-infantil-covid-19-mexico-costa-rica-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/2025\/02\/21\/diferencias-desarrollo-infantil-covid-19-mexico-costa-rica-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A study promoted by the ULL finds differences in child development during Covid-19 in Mexico and Costa Rica"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ana<\/a>

Ana Mar\u00eda Quezada-Ugalde.<\/p><\/div>\n

The article 'Findings on child development in children who grew up during the Covid-19 pandemic in two countries' is part of the international doctoral thesis of Ana Mar\u00eda Quezada-Ugalde, a student of Doctoral Program in Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Development and Quality of Life<\/a> from the University of La Laguna. The research is a mixed methods study that was developed in three phases: a quantitative one, a qualitative one and, finally, a sequential explanatory integration of the quantitative data with the qualitative findings.<\/p>\n

This publication corresponds to the quantitative phase of the project. It was carried out in Costa Rica and Mexico, and its main objective was to analyze the child development of children who remained at home during the social distancing measures implemented due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. A total of 183 children participated, divided into two independent groups: 92 in Costa Rica and 91 in Mexico.<\/p>\n

Participants were given a developmental screening test, created and validated for each country. This test assessed gross motor skills (movements such as crawling, walking, and running), fine motor skills (pointing, grasping small objects, and stringing beads), language (expressive and receptive), cognition (memory, and recognizing animals or objects), and socio-personal skills (knowing their name, imitating, and playing with others). In addition, the parents of the participating children completed a questionnaire designed to collect sociodemographic data and information about the challenges families faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and how these circumstances influenced their childcare practices.<\/p>\n

The results showed that the children's developmental level presented risks of delay in their overall scores, particularly affecting fine motor skills and language. Significant differences were observed in overall scores and fine motor skills between countries. The risks of developmental delay were associated with the child's sex and age, the mother's educational level, and the primary caregiver. In Costa Rica, it was found that children who grew up during the pandemic presented a greater risk of delay than the historical control group assessed before the pandemic.<\/p>\n

This is the most recent research examining child development in Costa Rica and Mexico after the years of the COVID-19 pandemic. These results contribute to understanding child development during the COVID-19 context and provide a basis for timely interventions to mitigate potential long-term effects, as well as for generating future research, says the doctor from the University of La Laguna and currently a professor at the University of Costa Rica.<\/p>\n

During the development of the study, some difficulties had to be faced, such as the abandonment of the study by some families, which caused the data collection to be prolonged more than necessary, and the different geographical locations of the researchers during the execution of the research.<\/p>\n

The collaboration included researchers such as Silvia Salazar Villegas and Mariana Cordero Gonz\u00e1lez, in Costa Rica, Alejandra Auza in Mexico and Alfonso Miguel Garc\u00eda, the latter two professors at the University of La Laguna and directors of the doctoral thesis.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The article 'Findings on child development in children who grew up during the Covid-19 pandemic in two countries' is part of\u2026<\/p>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":819,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,416,20,37,10],"tags":[492,493,494],"class_list":["post-1905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-destacado","category-escuela-de-doctorado-y-estudios-de-posgrado-facultades-y-escuelas","category-facultades-y-escuelas","category-investigacion","category-portada-ull","tag-ana-maria-quezada-ugalde","tag-covid-19","tag-desarrollo-infantil"],"acf":[],"primary_category":null,"featured_image_thumbnail_url":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/10\/ana-quezada-p-300x200.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1905"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1906,"href":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905\/revisions\/1906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ull.es\/portal\/noticias\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}