By Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD

My pandemic baby just turned 4. She finished her first year of preschool and is spending a busy summer playing and learning new skills like swimming and riding a bike. In my role as a parent and in my professional role, I’ve been thinking a lot about how children born during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic are doing now. 

What would my child be like if the pandemic had never happened? Which of her quirks, emotions, and struggles have been influenced by that experience, and which would be the same regardless? These are questions no parent will ever really be able to answer for our children specifically. Yet for broader trends, we can turn to current research to get a sense of how the pandemic affected the youngest children.

In some ways, we still have limited data addressing the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on child development (Goodwin, 2023). We are only four years out from the start of the pandemic, and the process of collecting, analyzing, and publishing data is a multi-year process. Gathering evidence of long-term implications will require even more time. 

Additionally, scientists had to change how they did their research during the pandemic. Could these changes have affected the data they collected? For one thing, there was greater reliance on parent-report (asking parents for their observations about their children) because it requires no in-person contact. It can be unclear when changes in parent-report data reflect an actual change in a child versus a change in a parent’s perception of the child. We know that parents were under additional levels of stress during the pandemic. Could parents’ stress have influenced their perceptions of their children’s behavior or development?

In other cases, researchers did interact with children, but they may have done it virtually or while masked. We don’t know exactly how those types of conditions impacted children’s responses. Even the fact that young children interacted with fewer strangers during those years could have changed how they reacted within research contexts.

Keeping these limitations and lingering questions in mind, the current scientific literature does generally demonstrate small but varying negative impacts of the pandemic on various family and child outcomes. Let’s dive into two subsets of information: the pandemic’s impact on parents and its direct impact on children.

Impact on parents

As I wrote in a previous series of blog posts, a main concern for early childhood development was how the pandemic impacted the adults in their lives. It is clear that the pandemic was stressful for parents, with some parents experiencing major life stressors such as job loss, income loss, and loss of access to health and mental health care (Goodwin, 2023).

The RAPID-EC study (2022; 2024) is a large-scale survey project that collected data continuously from parents throughout the pandemic and beyond. The RAPID-EC study showed that parents’ struggles with well-being and emotional distress worsened on average from May 2020 through April 2022. Since spring 2022, parent wellbeing has improved somewhat, but in February 2024, parents still reported higher stress and depression levels than they did pre-pandemic (RAPID-EC, 2022; 2024). These data show that parents’ struggles were not limited to the months of intense lockdowns, but continued for years after the U.S. government ended its pandemic state of emergency.

Two studies have shown that COVID-19 impacted mothers’ perception of their infant’s temperament (Bianco et al., 2023; Morris & Saxbe et al., 2023). A more negative perception of infants’ temperament was correlated with pandemic-related life disruptions, stress levels, and depressive symptoms (but not COVID-19 infection). It is possible that these infants cried more, were less content, and were harder to settle. However, these studies did not measure that directly. What we can say, based on these studies, is that for many people, parenting an infant during COVID-19 was seen as more difficult than parenting an infant before the pandemic.

Impact on children

A main takeaway from my review of the literature was that there is no evidence for significant global developmental delays as a result of the pandemic (Hessami et al., 2022; Goodwin, 2023).  This is a relief to many. It means that we should not assume that this generation as a whole will experience developmental struggles. 

The pandemic does, however, appear to have impacted specific skills. A large, ongoing longitudinal study found that children born in 2020 and 2021 had some delays in social and communication development and increased behavior problems compared to children born in the prior decade (Deoni et al., 2021; 2022). A study of Head Start children in Washington State found that in fall 2019, 79% of children entering were developmentally at age level, but that fell to 62% in fall 2022. Educators also noted that fewer children were potty trained and that there were more difficulties with cooperation, sharing, and being part of a group (Warren, 2023).

While the pandemic itself was universal, what COVID-19 meant for an infant or toddler was very individualized across families. Higher socioeconomic status seems to be one protective factor against the negative effects of the pandemic (Deoni, 2022). Resilience is not an innate characteristic of a child. It resides within a system and is greatly dependent on the adults in a child’s system. Perhaps unsurprisingly, children who were already disadvantaged by systemic factors such as poverty and discrimination were more likely to see stronger negative impacts of the pandemic. 

Reflections

Overall, the research we have on children born during the pandemic reinforces the link between parental well-being and child development. It also demonstrates the importance of a child’s individual early experience: their particular circumstances can provide more or less protection from the negative impacts of an event like the pandemic. With that being said, the scientific literature also shows evidence of great resilience for COVID babies. The wonderful promise of early childhood is that children’s brains are constantly growing and learning, and every day a child’s experiences continue to cumulatively affect their development. 

For many adults, the vagueness of the “end” of the pandemic didn’t support reflection about what that experience really meant to us. I think much of our COVID-19 experience has gone unprocessed. If you work with children and families, I would challenge you to stay curious about our COVID babies. As you interact with families, ask yourself questions like these:

• What did the pandemic mean for this parent? What losses or gains did they experience (support, connection, information)? Have their experiences been heard and acknowledged?
• What did the pandemic mean for this child? How did it shape the first few years of their life?  What losses or gains did they experience (development, support, connection, information)? What “silver linings” may have been present?

Birthdays are a wonderful time to reflect and celebrate. As our 2020 babies turn 4, I continue to marvel at the unique creativity and joy each of these children brings to the world. There were some pretty great things that came out of 2020, after all!

References

Bianco, C., Sania, A., Kyle, M. H., Beebe, B., Barbosa, J., Bence, M., … & Amso, D. (2023). Pandemic beyond the virus: maternal COVID-related postnatal stress is associated with infant temperament. Pediatric Research, 93(1), 253-259.

Deoni, S. C., Beauchemin, J., Volpe, A., D’Sa, V., & Resonance Consortium. (2021). Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on early child cognitive development: initial findings in a longitudinal observational study of child health. MedRxiv.

Deoni, S. C., Beauchemin, J., Volpe, A., D’Sa, V., & Resonance Consortium (2022). The COVID-19 pandemic and early child cognitive development: a comparison of development in children born during the pandemic and historical references. MedRxiv.

Goodwin, C. (2023). Are the pandemic babies and kids okay? Parenting Translator.

Hessami, K., Norooznezhad, A. H., Monteiro, S., Barrozo, E. R., Abdolmaleki, A. S., Arian, S. E., … & Shamshirsaz, A. A. (2022). COVID-19 pandemic and infant neurodevelopmental impairment: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Network Open, 5(10), e2238941-e2238941.

Morris, A. R., & Saxbe, D. E. (2023). Differences in infant negative affectivity during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Infant Mental Health Journal, 44(4), 466-479.

RAPID-EC. (2022). Parents on struggles with well-being and emotional distress during the pandemic.

RAPID-EC. (2024). Latest data and trends.

Warren, K. (2023). News release: data shows devastating impact of COVID pandemic on preschoolers. Washington State Association of Head Start and ECEAP.

Related subjects

Tags: covid-19, infant and early childhood mental health, parents and caregivers