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If you used Google to get ideas on what hobbies to pick up during the pandemic, you are far from alone. The search query spiked at one time even as high as 400 percent.
But did you know some of these new hobbies could be improving your family s intelligence quotient (IQ)? A fun new report suggests as much.
DIYS.com, a site dedicated to DIY projects and tutorials, asked more than 4,500 volunteers in July 2020 to choose a hobby to take up during the pandemic. Volunteers were asked to take an IQ test on 123Test.com before they started their new hobby and six months later to see which ones might improve cerebral intelligence. (IQ scores the average being 100 measure a person s reasoning ability and how well and fast they can recall information and solve puzzles.)
The cost of child care has long been a struggle for many families around the country, and the struggle has only become worse during the pandemic.
Just how much worse? Center-based child care costs have spiked 41 percent, according to a report from LendingTree, which analyzed data from a September 2020 report from the Center for American Progress and Child Care Aware of America. That s $14,117 compared to $9,977 before the pandemic.
Families in certain states are feeling the impact even more. Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana have seen the largest child care costs increases for kids 3 and 4 years old, the report finds. For example, in Louisiana, child care costs jumped from $6,546 to $13,810 per kid. In the meantime, parents in Indiana and Vermont with kids younger than 5 were found to be putting the highest percentage of their income toward child care 20 and 19 percent respectively.
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At the beginning of the pandemic, there was speculation that there might be a baby boom. As people were urged to stay home, the joke was bored couples would, well, opt to conceive.
While some hospitals across the country are noticing a boom, including an Indianapolis one which says deliveries are up 30 percent, experts predict that won t be the overall reality of 2021.
Instead, the pandemic will more likely lead to a baby bust.
A report about Google Trends found a decrease in pregnancy-related terms since the pandemic. Surveys show a change in family planning, including one that found more than 40 percent have shifted their plans on when to have kids and how many to have. States, including Florida, Ohio, and Arizona, have also reported drops in birth rates.
What s going on with respiratory season? It s something Rashmi Jain, M.D., pediatrician and founder of BabiesMD, Pediatric Urgent Care, has been wondering after noticing fewer common illnesses among the kids she treats at her practice, which has been exclusively telemedicine since the beginning of the pandemic.
She s not the only one: pediatricians across the country have been noticing the trend and they aren t wrong. Reports show that common illnesses are in fact down.
Seasonal flu cases are at record lows in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). We haven t seen nearly the level of influenza that we have historically seen in years before, says Meg Meeker, M.D., a pediatrician and bestselling author of