Pandemic Babies Are Entering Kindergarten & We're Only Now Processing How Weird Their First Year Was

It’s been five years since the pandemic first started, but parents who had kids in 2020 don’t forget so easily. Especially now, as those “pandemic babies” head off to kindergarten.

As for me, my son was 8 months old when the pandemic started and daycare shut down. He learned how to crawl the same week he was home, and it was a mix of joy and panic as I juggled full-time work with no childcare. When daycare reopened, I worried he’d get sick, yes, but also that he wouldn’t learn how to talk since all his teachers (and everyone he interacted with except for his parents) wore masks. Strangely enough, we didn’t test positive for Covid until two years later, and fast forward to today with two more kids into the mix, and it turns out that my first one was the most verbal (and continues to be a total chatterbox).

But those early days were definitely weird. I checked in with a couple of other moms whose children were also born during the pandemic, and here’s what they shared.

Katie was living in Brooklyn, NY when her son was born in March 2020.

“I delivered March 25, which was three days after NY State was put on pause…Most notably, I delivered during the week-long partner ban that NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital implemented. My husband was restricted access to the hospital, so he took me as far as he could. We said our goodbyes on the curb right outside of the entrance, and then I had to do the rest without him.”

She recalls masked-up surgery, isolated recovery, nurses terrified to enter her room, and missing her husband most when her newborn wanted constant feeding. She was discharged 40 hours after delivery. “That night, once my family had been reunited, we were all safely home and the boys were asleep—my body started shaking uncontrollably. My midwife suspected that was all the adrenaline I had stored up, releasing.”

Across the ocean in London, Hannah described a similarly lonely birth experience in October 2020: “Being in the UK we had very tough and strict restrictions throughout the whole of my pregnancy. It changed daily! In the end, my partner was not able to be in the delivery room with me until I was about to give birth. Then we had around one hour together before he was told to leave because of the restrictions and to come back the following day.”

Leading up to delivery, Hannah recalls that the lack of in-person classes and support left her feeling isolated. “Online antenatal classes aren't the same. And I really wanted to go to the store to test out all the pushchairs and make our decision together, but we didn’t want to risk exposure so we bought everything online.”

For many parents, the hardest part wasn’t just the birth itself but the long, quiet aftermath. The missed “village” of grandparents, friends and new mom groups.

Ellen in Chicago, IL also delivered her baby in October 2020. “I randomly was looking back at old notes in my Notes app the other day, and the ones from those early days are bat shit crazy. I had extreme anxiety about her health, breastfeeding, her weight, sleep safety, everything,” she tells me.

Even small milestones—like introducing a new baby to friends—were fraught with anxiety or lost completely. I attended multiple baby showers and first birthday parties over Zoom that year and, well, it just wasn’t the same as celebrating a tiny human in person (“you’re on mute!”). As for us, we had one family come over for my son’s first birthday party who we were bubbling with at the time, while other invitees came by our house and congratulated him and us from the street outside.

The other day I found one of my son’s tiny face masks and asked if he remembered ever wearing it. (At one point the CDC recommended masks for kids ages 2 and up, though by the time he hit that milestone, restrictions had fortunately eased up and his school only advised, not mandated, them.) He just looked at me blankly—no recollection whatsoever.

Katie reflects: “He is a healthy, happy, funny, resourceful kid. I think one positive side effect of Covid was that my husband, who would usually travel a lot for work, was suddenly home all the time. Having him close helped to establish a very deep bond between him and both our boys.”

Still, the immune system challenges were real. As Hannah recalls, once her daughter started daycare, “Whatever she then caught she got bad—chicken pox, scarlet fever, even tiny colds took her ages to recover from. It was very scary!”

These days when I have to keep a kid home from school, I try to remind myself that it will never be as bad as during the early days of the pandemic. There was a period in 2021 where my son went a full 19 weeks (I remember, I counted!) without actually making it through a full week, largely due to illness after illness and a very strict sick policy (you had to be fever-free for 48 hours, no green snot allowed, negative Covid tests, quarantine periods, etc.).

If the kids will grow up barely remembering, the parents are a different story.

“I think about [Covid] every year on my son's birthday,” Katie says. “He is our goofy little Covid reminder. I still wish that my husband could have been in person at the delivery…He says that I should let this go…but I struggle with that.”

Ellen echoes this. While her daughter is thriving, she admits the pandemic likely made her and her partner extra anxious beyond the normal “this is my first kid” type of stress. “It probably made us a little weird,” she says. (Remember when we were all wiping down groceries with Clorox wipes and hoarding toilet paper?)

Ultimately, these pandemic babies have proven exactly what we hoped for—that they are resilient, adaptable and joyful despite the strangeness of their first year. But for the parents, the memories linger.

It’s not all bad, though. “I can appreciate how strong our family is,” says Katie. “We lived through something really hard and found the strength to do that in each other.” As I prepare to send my "pandemic kid" off into a new school year, I couldn't agree more.