About six months into my pregnancy with my second child, I got COVID. My 105-degree fever made me shake so hard with chills that my teeth chattered loud enough to wake my husband from his sleep.
It was the end of February 2020, and when I could open my eyes and feel coherent, I would Google my alarming fever temperatures and panic when it said I was on the edge of hallucinations and brain damage. I read about COVID pregnancy nightmare stories of babies being delivered prematurely, isolated from their moms for weeks at a time. I thought endlessly about my daughter, growing inside my sick body: Would she be okay, and if we both made it through this illness, what kind of world would she be born into?
After ten days, I slowly got better and all the ultrasounds and exams showed that the baby was fine — thriving even. Then a few months later, in May, she was born in the midst of lockdowns and playground closures. Suddenly, I had a newborn and a toddler, the four of us including my husband, trapped in a tiny apartment, trying to live and work and grow despite the fear and anxiety and chaos in the world.
Now, somehow remarkably, that baby has just started kindergarten.
According to a recent U.K. study from the Centre for Young Lives, a significant percentage of the kids who, like my daughter, were born in the early days of the pandemic are actually not yet school-ready — some are still not potty-trained, some arrive to school in strollers and can’t focus on books, and some of them swipe and tap on pages like they’re tablets. The study made for provocative headlines that found their way to X and got people ranting and raving about negligent parents.
Apparently, the idea that a 4-year-old might still be struggling with speech or delayed in their socialization is down to a “lack of standards” — a 4-year-old who, for the first years of their life, often wasn’t allowed near other kids, isolated in the extreme by lockdowns, cut off from friends and family at some of their most formative moments.
For the record, my 4-year-old is potty-trained (she had to be to attend toddler day care at 18 months), and though she’d love to hop in the stroller on a long walk, she’s independently mobile. But even if she weren’t, would I be a terrible parent, after the past four years, if I gave in to those stroller demands while I tried to manage and negotiate everything else on my plate? I certainly wouldn’t blame another parent if they made that choice.
Everything about the past four years has left an indelible mark, if not entirely on my kid, then definitely on me as a parent. It’s easy to blank out what happened during that period for a lot of people, but having kids, of any age, heightened the stress and fear of the pandemic. We were juggling full-time work, often in an entirely new setting with greater expectations and oversight, plus full-time child care without so many of our usual tools available to us, including, for me, playgrounds, drop-in centers, libraries, gyms, community centers, and day cares. These kids were all home, desperate for attention and distraction, and we were frantically toggling between work and care while panicking that we or our parents or our children were going to die from this virus.
Is it fair to now say that parents might have some latent, dare I say, trauma from that experience that has made our approach to child care a little different? With my first, I had the space to focus on so many of the granular points of early development, including the more organic opportunities for growth that being around other people and kids provided. With my daughter, it was like all the lights were suddenly shut off and the whole family was stuck in a vacuum. The focus became survival — just get through the day, the week, the month. A lot got lost in the shuffle as I fought to keep my job and my sanity while breastfeeding a newborn and chasing a toddler.
Like a lot of parents at the time, I felt like I was coming undone, and that feeling hasn’t entirely gone away.
In September, the U.S. surgeon general issued a warning that parental stress has become a critical health concern. The report said two-fifths of parents are so stressed they can’t function. So stressed they can’t function — it bears repeating.
“Parenting during the pandemic felt very isolating, stressful, and ‘high stakes’ — like every decision you made could have life-altering consequences for your child and others around you,” says Danielle Vermeer, a mom on the West Coast who also had a baby in 2020. Her daughter just started kindergarten too, and so far she says she’s loving it and adjusting well. But Vermeer thinks it’s clear we’re just now starting to see the impact of the past four years “with the surgeon general saying parental stress is an urgent public-health issue.”
Kristin, a mom in Toronto, had a child in April 2020. She says her daughter had no exposure to people outside her parents because of the lockdowns, and “surprise — she has always struggled with adjusting to new people and new situations.” Kristin found parenting in that atmosphere severely difficult and struggled with the lack of outside connection and help. She had a son a few years later and says the difference in parenting has been “night and day.”
I’ve written a lot about what parenting through the pandemic was like, how it felt like a primal scream, how difficult it was to tackle both career and care at once, how badly mothers in particular were ignored. No one gave a shit about us as they posted about their new hobbies and all that fucking bread. We’ve been drowning, and a lifeline has never been extended.
It’s easy to deride parents for their failings, to criticize us for perceived oversights, and much harder to hold empathy for what it takes to manage everything with the scars of the past few years still raw, still bleeding. I often worry that my son’s handwriting has fallen behind his peers’ because I wasn’t able to work with him on those fundamentals before he started kindergarten in 2021, but I remind myself of what was happening in the world just before he started school and try to forgive myself for the few things that did slip through the cracks. Penmanship wasn’t top of mind as we were bleaching grocery bags and making sure our elderly parents would survive the winter.
Now, the toll of those years — hell, of these years — has truly shown itself. Parenting has become a health issue unto itself. For once, let’s draw a line from the problem to the root cause before pulling out the digital pitchforks.
Connect the fucking dots and it should be no surprise that parents feel paralyzed, unable to function under the stress. We haven’t had the time or space or support to recover from the impact of the past few years. Rather than mock us for failing to adequately prepare our pandemic babies for school, maybe consider how we got here in the first place.
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