By Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, Research Associate

Parents and caregivers have a lot to think and worry about during the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve written about parental concerns around lack of socialization and novel experiences, as well as questions about mask-wearing and increased screen time. I’ve provided some research-based information that I hope will ease parents’ and caregivers’ minds and help them make the most of children’s interactions with them and with others in these challenging times. However, my biggest child development concern actually relates to how the pandemic is affecting us, the adults. 

Experience-expectant processes: what really matters right now

Relationships with adults are, by far, the most foundational component of healthy child development. Children rely on responsive interactions with their caregivers to build brain development. Relationships with stable, nurturing adults create a buffer for children from the negative impact of stressful or traumatic events.

Will children be impacted by the stress their parents and caregivers are feeling?

My short answer: The good news is that “good enough” parenting really is good enough. You do not have to respond to your child at every moment, and you can continue to nurture and grow your relationship even through instances of conflict. That is true even when the adult is the one who loses their cool. 

What is concerning is that for some families, the pandemic creates substantial barriers to high-quality parent-child relationships. The stress of losing a job, housing, or food security; the loss of social support; increased depression and anxiety—all of these factors have the potential to negatively impact the interactions that children have in their homes.

Similarly, for children in child care or early education settings, stress on providers is known to negatively impact positive relationships with children and even increase the likelihood of expelling children from programs. When professional caregivers are overwhelmed due to ever-changing policies and concerns about finances and job stability, it impacts the care they can provide to children. Also, as children re-enter schools and child care after interruptions caused by the pandemic, providers will be challenged to support children with less experience in social situations and more early life stress than they had previously. 

This is most concerning for:

• Families already experiencing poverty or other major stressors
• Families with existing mental health concerns
• Families dealing with racial injustice and discrimination

What can we do to mitigate concerns?

In order to stop the pandemic from hurting the development of young children, we must support the adults who are caring for them.

• As parents, we can intentionally repair relationships with our children when needed.  While they don’t need to know details, it’s OK for them to know that you are stressed and that sometimes you get impatient or mad, but that it’s not their fault and you still love them.
• For parents, staying connected with a social support group and doing what you can to support your own mental health is important, but in many situations can only go so far.  Policies and programs that can directly address the major stressors in family’s lives (e.g., financial insecurity, mental health concerns) are needed to ensure that children are given a chance to thrive. 
• Similarly, people who work in early childhood care and education need to be given the practical and emotional support necessary for them to continue to serve children and families under high stress. Policies and programs need to be put in place to ensure providers have access to the knowledge and skills necessary to support children. They must also have adequate time and support to meet the demands of their job.  
• For those who work in early childhood education, reflective supervision is a growing professional development practice that can provide emotional support and an outlet for the stress that frontline professionals are subject to. You can download a free e-book from the Reflective Practice Center at CEED to learn more about the benefits of reflective supervision.

Selma Fraiberg, a pioneer in infant mental health, once said that working to promote healthy development in young children is “a little like having God on your side.” Children have an amazing ability to grow and thrive in a huge variety of circumstances. Yes, the pandemic is affecting children’s lives here and now, limiting their opportunity for peer interaction and a variety of experiences, but this year will only be one block in building their development. 

At the same time, the pandemic can affect child development by disrupting the nurturing relationships between children and their caregivers. This is both COVID-19’s most significant potential threat to child development and the most difficult to address, because it requires a commitment from policymakers to support both families and the child care and education systems that they depend on. As we continue through what we hope are the final months of the pandemic and look forward to the recovery phase, let’s make sure to focus on giving parents and caregivers the support they need to be there for their children. 

By Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, Research Associate

Parents and caregivers are understandably concerned about how our changed lifestyle amid the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting children. In my previous post on the subject, I explained how I categorized some of parents’ most common questions based on a theory of brain development that breaks learning down into experience-expectant and experience-dependent processes. Experience-dependent processes can occur anytime in life. (In other words, if your two-year-old is missing out on peer interactions right now, don’t worry: she can catch up next year.) 

In this installment, I’ll address aspects of the pandemic that I think fall into a kind of middle ground. These aspects alter the environment that the developing brain is set up to learn from. That means they can cross the line into affecting experience-expectant processes and so are areas of potential concern. The good news is that adults can act to mitigate these experiences so that they don’t affect children in the long term.

Will babies be affected by seeing adults wearing masks?

Beginning at birth, babies prefer to look at faces—even drawings of faces or face-like shapes—above all else. It’s clear that they’re biologically programmed to seek out faces and that caregivers’ emotional expressions provide crucial information about the world around them. Adults in public places are now wearing masks, making their faces distinctly less face-like, and hiding our mouths, which are the most obvious indicators of smiles. 

My short answer: Babies are incredibly resilient. They can probably learn a lot in whatever time they have with unmasked adults. It’s unlikely that sometimes seeing adults, including primary caregivers, in masks will have a great impact on children’s development—although babies may notice and even show some distress. However, children who spend long hours in settings with masked caregivers may not be getting critical input that the developing brain expects and relies on. I don’t know of any research at this time that can point to how much unmasked time is enough.

This is most concerning for: 

• Children who spend long hours in child care settings with masked providers
• Young babies who don’t have the vision and cognition to process the variety of environmental cues that toddlers and preschoolers do
• Children with developmental delays or difficulties with emotion regulation or perspective-taking

What can we do to mitigate concerns?

• Make sure that adults who live in babies’ households (so they don’t need to be masked) know the importance of face-to-face time. Every minute counts in terms of eye contact, facial expressions, and talking to your baby.
• For those who must be masked when interacting with babies, there are clear masks available that allow others to see your mouth when interacting with you. The ClearMask is one version that has been approved by the FDA and is being recommended by the Florida Association for Infant Mental Health.

Will the increase in screen time harm our children?

Like most parents working from home, I have used screens more than I otherwise would to occupy my toddler. A lot of parents I know worry about this, and with good reason, as children’s brains do not expect to sit and passively consume blinking lights as a main source of stimulation. There is evidence that too much screen time can affect children’s ability to pay attention and regulate their own behavior. However, we also know that the content chosen matters greatly, and that children can learn academic and social skills from high-quality TV and games.

My short answer: This depends on dose and content. Screen time has the potential to be harmful for children if it takes away their opportunities to play, be active, and engage in other types of thinking, or if they are watching shows that are violent or not age-appropriate.

What can we do to mitigate concerns?

• Choose programming intentionally that will promote cognitive and social skills. With limited opportunities to play with other children or experience new ideas and places, the content kids view on screens is likely shaping their world view now more than ever, and we can use that to our advantage! PBS has great shows for young children–Daniel Tiger, Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, and Elinor Wonders Why are a few that are designed to teach children academic and social skills. Khan Academy has a free app with age-specific games. Search the internet for videos about any of your child’s interests, from how a garbage truck works to live streams of baby polar bears.
• Be involved in screen time. I know that often, the whole point of screens is to have a chance to do something else. But if you watch a show with your child every once in a while or even just catch the first or last few minutes, you’ll glean enough to help children apply lessons from the show to their own life. 
• Set limits and be consistent. Make the limits reasonable given your current situation so that you can stick to them; it’s OK if this looks different than it would in non-pandemic life. Children will be less likely to have meltdowns if they can expect that screens are used during a specific time of day for a certain length of time.

My next post in this series will explore my greatest concern about children’s development during COVID-19: the pandemic’s impact on adults.

By Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, Research Associate

As the pandemic has dragged on over nearly a year now, I’ve had to adjust my expectations for a return to “normal,” along with everyone else. There’s now a light at the end of the tunnel as vaccines are distributed. Nevertheless, many parents of young children have lingering concerns. The years from birth to five are recognized as a foundational period for child development. Children in that age bracket will have spent 20% of that important period in this altered pandemic life. How will it affect their long-term development?

Normal behavior or pandemic problem?

In my personal experience, it has been hard to sort out normal behavior from the pandemic’s influence. When my younger daughter, now six months old, was six weeks old, my husband contracted COVID-19. Because he was instructed to self-isolate within our home, the only adult face our daughter saw for three weeks was my own. When our baby was 12 weeks old, her grandmothers began providing child care for her and our older daughter. Our baby was very fussy and often cried when she looked at her grandmothers closely. How much of that was typical stranger anxiety and how much was due to her experience in the pandemic?

We didn’t go to any playgrounds for a few months. After playgrounds reopened, another child approached my two-year-old daughter and said, “Hi.” My daughter cried. How much of that was her naturally shy personality and how much was due to the pandemic?

For a few months, my two-year-old was obsessed with Daniel Tiger. Most of her pretend play revolved around things she saw him do: fly a kite, buy shoes, make an obstacle course. She even started using words from the show, like “grr-ific” and “tiger-tastic,” in conversation. Was this simply a two-year-old’s enthusiasm? Or was it because it had been so long since she’d gone to a library, a grocery store, or a restaurant—much less seen friends in person—that she no longer had vivid personal recollections on which to base her pretend play?

In each of these cases, there were likely normal developmental forces at work interacting with the experience of living in a pandemic. There’s no way to know “what might have been” had there been no pandemic. But as parents, we naturally worry about what our children have lost and grieve for this year of their childhood as we had pictured it for them.

As a parent and child psychology researcher, I think it’s important to address parents’ concerns. But I also know it’s important not to get too stressed out about things that won’t matter in the long run. I’ve identified some of the biggest concerns I’ve heard from parents regarding the pandemic’s effect on children. Based on my personal experience and my training as a developmental psychologist, I’ve sorted these concerns into three categories.

• The first category includes pandemic-related circumstances towards which developmental science suggests children will show resilience. I’ve addressed these questions below and provided some tips for parents and caregivers.
• The second category includes legitimate concerns, but ones that we as parents and caregivers can affect positively in the near term. I’ve addressed these in the second post in this series and provided some additional tips.
• The third category includes major causes for concern. In the final post in this series, I’ve explained why addressing these serious problems will require collective effort, rather than individual actions.

Experience-expectant and experience-dependent processes

The framework that has helped me create these categories is a developmental concept that describes how genes and environment interact to result in learning. In a 1987 paper, William Greenough and colleagues suggested that humans learn through what they called experience-expectant and experience-dependent processes. 

Experience-expectant processes are based on information that the brain expects to be present in the environment and that we are genetically prepared to take in. This includes sources of information that are universally present in typical development, such as vision or language. If babies are not exposed to these sources of information during a specific time in their development, their brain will prune away the neurons that would typically be devoted to processing them. Experience-dependent processes, on the other hand, are what allow humans to learn a huge variety of skills. Our brains are not “hard-wired” to learn hockey or chess; we can learn these skills at any time in our lives. This kind of learning involves forming new synapses rather than pruning neurons.

Experience-dependent learning: Don’t worry, our kids will catch up

In this section, I’ll address two of the most common concerns I’ve heard from parents.

Will the lack of peer interaction harm my children? 

My short answer: There’s no “critical period” for learning social skills. If a child misses out on some things at age two, she can learn them next year at three. While the transition back to frequent, large-group peer interactions might be uncomfortable and require adult support, kids will bounce back. I don’t predict many long-term effects on personality or on children’s ability to make friends.

What can we do to mitigate parents’ concerns?

• Focus on interactions with the people in your household. While your child may not get to interact with as many same-age peers as they normally would, they can learn a lot of skills interacting with siblings and parents. Talk about and model skills like taking turns and using “please” and “thank you.”
• Try short Zoom playdates with planned activities. It’s harder for toddlers and preschoolers to carry on a conversation when they can’t physically interact, but they can have a dance party, do a show and tell of their toys, or play games like “Simon Says.”
• Silver lining: This situation is making siblings (if your child has them) more essential playmates than they otherwise would have been! 

Are children suffering from a lack of stimulation?

My short answer: While trips and activities are certainly enjoyable and enriching, all the experiences needed for supporting brain development in young children can be done at home. As a parent, I completely understand that it’s daunting (and repetitive) to be stuck inside all winter with your kids. But as long as children are given the opportunity to play, they are doing the necessary work of childhood.

What can we do to mitigate parents’ concerns?

• If staying at home gets boring, try thinking about different categories of play: pretend play, gross motor, fine motor, music and dancing, construction play, and playing games. Try to promote a mix of these each day. 
• Remember that your perspective is different from your child’s. To them, reading the same book over and over again is a great opportunity to learn and understand. In their playroom, they may visit the farm, the fire station, and the moon all within 10 minutes! 
• Acknowledge your own sadness about what might have been, but try to reframe another day at home as another day to engage in high-quality play.

Children have grown up in an infinite number of different conditions across history, location, and culture. As a middle-class parent in the United States, I have an “ideal childhood” in mind for my children, but I also know that I am part of a generation whose expectations tend toward intensive parenting and over-involvement. Sometimes, I think about the things that my children are missing out on, like playgrounds, museums, birthday parties, and holiday celebrations. I feel sad about the loss of fun experiences and about the delay in forming positive relationships and discovering my family’s traditions. However, I don’t worry about their long-term development. In many other environments, it’s very normal for children to spend their early childhood at home with one or a few caregivers.

In the next post in this series, I’ll tackle parents’ questions that fall into a kind of “middle ground”: research confirms that they are real concerns, but they also have real solutions.