Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Tuesday, September 14th. I'm Naila Boudou.

Here's what we're following. The group trying to get more Black Democrats elected to Washington.

Plus, getting to the bottom of hate crimes data. But first, today's one big thing.

What we actually know about young kids development in this pandemic.

The number of COVID cases in kids has skyrocketed with the Delta variant.

For the week ending September 9th, children made up 28.9% of reported weekly cases.

That's according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

But contracting COVID-19 as far from the only risk for young people during this pandemic.

With the new school year upon us and more data coming out all the time,

we wanted to spend the next few days looking at some of the ways COVID has affected children.

From language development to mental health from toddlers to teens.

To kick us off is communication sciences and disorder professor Elizabeth Spencer Norton.

She and her team at Northwestern University have been studying the effects of COVID on young kids development.

Hi, Elizabeth. Thanks for being with us. Hi, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Elizabeth, let's start first with what data we do have.

About how COVID is especially affecting our youngest kids.

When we think about language development, social skills, how they're doing in school.

We don't have a lot of data yet.

There is one study that is appropriate, meaning that it hasn't yet been peer reviewed.

That has received some attention because it showed somewhat of a drop in scores of children

who are already being studied during the course of COVID.

And lower scores for children born during the pandemic than their peers born in previous years.

...