In late January 2020, I had my second child, a baby girl. By all accounts, the experience was similar to my first child, a baby boy born in 2015. In both cases, I went into labor a week before my due date, went through a natural birth at the same hospital and then took my daughter home to the same bassinet that my son had slept in five years earlier.
Everything was going swimmingly until a month later when a global pandemic swept the nation and all of the sudden our world shut down. Since then, my now two-year-old has known a different world than my son did, without travel, restaurants, playdates, birthday parties, baby music classes or preschool. And even as the world begins to open back up, she’s still unvaccinated and taking her places, especially indoors, presents a risk.
The fear is that my daughter, along with thousands of children born in the midst of a pandemic, may be at a developmental disadvantage because there is a lack of social contact. Experts are particularly concerned that COVID babies, who experienced little interaction with the outside world, might have more difficulty verbalizing than babies who were born outside the constraints of a worldwide pandemic.
