While it has become relatively manageable, the pandemic is far from over. New strains and variants continue to be discovered and reported. Meanwhile, parents of newborns at the start of the pandemic have begun to be more vocal about their concerns about their child’s healthy growth and development.
In two parts, we will bring you the top 20 child development concerns parents have for their young children during the pandemic.

1. Social interaction

Most young children have very limited social interaction during the first 2 years of the pandemic. As most young children’s sources of social interaction have dwindled to just their parents, siblings if any and child care providers and peers, most parents worry about their children’s social interactions with other people excluding the small circle of people they regularly interact with.
This includes grandparents and relatives they don’t normally see and strangers in public places such as parks, playgrounds, restaurants, and even supermarkets.

2. Social skills

Tied with social interactions, parents also worry about their children’s social skills development. The ability to communicate and express their thoughts and feelings in a proper manner may be hampered by decreased social interaction with a more varied set of people.

3. Ability to understand their emotions/feelings

Research has shown that young children are porous not only when it comes to their learning but also in absorbing their parents’ emotions and feelings. Dr. Stephanie Bonza, a Chicago clinical forensic psychologist, says children may absorb their parents’ feeling of anxiety.

4. Speech — saying words or crying, babbling squealing etc

As young children lose opportunities to hear more words, what with being cooped up indoors for the majority of the first two years of the pandemic, these young tots may have heard fewer words than the previous generation. Whereas babies and young toddlers who were born and grew up before the pandemic may have heard people conversing in public spaces, these young children are severely limited.

5. Literacy skills — such as spelling their name or reading simple words

As young children miss early childhood education, it can be harder for them to get a head start developing their reading and writing skills. While parents try to do their best in teaching their children how to read and write, they can only do so much. Formal instruction led by an ECE teacher who knows how to best teach a child in terms of writing and reading and help them overcome any learning difficulties is still the best way a child can get a headstart in learning their ABC’s.
Early on in the pandemic, even parents of young children have had viral videos of them sharing just how hard it is to teach a young child simple and basic English words. While parents can easily learn how to take care of their child, teaching them is on another whole new level for which they aren’t trained. The pandemic has transformed parents into fledgling teachers trying to learn about the lesson as much as their young child in order to guide, if not teach, their very young children.

6. Communication understanding — such as ‘roll the ball’ or ‘throw the ball’

By age 3, a young child who’s been in regular childcare will have heard more requests, commands, and action words more than a child who was born and grew up during the first 2 years of the pandemic. While parents strive to play with their young children,

7. Recognizing places — knowing where things are

As young children are severely limited in terms of mobility, their young world is also smaller than what other children born in previous years. Given how they were both protected and prevented from venturing out into public spaces such as grocery stores and restaurants, young children saw much less of the community they were born into than older children. Thus, it’s not surprising that parents worry about their young children’s geospatial knowledge of the community they are in when they’re confined to their home.

8. Numeracy skills — such as sorting shapes or counting small numbers

A limited environment leads to limited learning opportunities–and that includes being able to recognize shapes or numbers.

9. Emotional intelligence

Another aspect which has been directly hit by the pandemic is young children’s capacity to interact, understand and get along with others, especially their peers. Since most young children will only have the companionship of either their parents or older siblings, it largely limits their ability to learn how to interact with another child of their age who’s a stranger to them.
Enter more meltdowns and tantrums due to their inability to handle difficult situations in which differences may arise. While most childcare centers and daycares have opened, being forced to closed when infections happen disrupts routine opportunities for young children to socialize and cultivate their social and emotional landscape by being with other people and peers.

10. Movement — such as crawling, walking, jumping etc.

Having access to a wider space and a variety of play environments such as a childcare environment and playgrounds that have various landscapes that allow young children to explore and develop their gross motor skills.
While determined parents can rearrange their living space to accommodate spaces where young children can safely move and develop their bodies, it can only do so much.

To parents of very young children who were born during the pandemic, it may seem that your worries about your child’s development may never end. But what you have to remember is that young children and their wonderful brains are very resilient. Only you know and think that the time they grew up in is very far from the normal circumstances older generations have grown up with but for your pandemic babies, this is their normal way of life.
They may continue putting masks on their toys, pretend to administer COVID-19 tests, or take longer to warm up to strangers but they will eventually get the hang of things and adapt to an ever-changing post-pandemic world.