Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, my toddler had a bustling social life. He went to an in-home daycare center that he generally loved. They had daily dance parties. They celebrated each other’s birthdays. The other kids hugged my son when we dropped him off in the morning and erupted into cheers on more than one occasion. It was a charming place. Still, when that daycare abruptly closed last March, my toddler, then almost 2, was happy. He was home with his parents and big brother every day. While the rest of us struggled to adjust to the new rhythms of lockdown, he relished the extra family time.
But now, he’s been home with us all day, every day for a year — more than a third of his life — and I’m beginning to worry a bit about the impact this long stretch of relative isolation has had on him. It’s not as though his days have been filled with playdates and enriching outings. On the homefront, he’s often (sorry, kid!) pretty ignored while his dad and I try and cram in work. He’s become timid around strangers. His sleep is … wrong.
HuffPost Parents spoke to several experts about the pandemic’s impact on the youngest kiddos ― particularly given that it’s unclear when we will get back to normalcy.
Overall, experts are NOT worried about toddlers.
Ample evidence has emerged that the pandemic has harmed the mental health and emotional development of many, many children, from surveys showing that 60% of teenagers say they’re lonely to deeply troubling federal data that revealed a 24% jump in mental health-related emergency room visits among 5- to 11-year-olds. “I am worried about children’s development being affected by the pandemic,” said Aubrey Hargis, a parenting coach and author of “Toddler Discipline for Every Age and Stage: Effective Strategies to Tame Tantrums, Overcome Challenges, and Help Your Child Grow.” “But it’s not toddlers I am concerned about.”
That’s because toddlers need to be in a comfortable, safe environment with a nurturing caregiver, Hargis said. If those needs are being met — and that’s a big “if” because, for many families, that has been a profound challenge during the pandemic — then toddlers really should do just fine, she said. After all, lockdowns and social distance have not limited younger kiddos’ worlds in a big way. “All of the things that toddlers need to develop are likely to still be in place: toys or other objects to play with, some furniture to climb on, socks to learn how to put on, messy spaghetti sauce to engage their senses, and an adult or sibling to talk to them to develop receptive and expressive language skills,” Hargis said.
One primary reason toddler experts aren’t apprehensive about how the pandemic could harm 1, 2, and 3-year-olds? Toddlers do a lot of their development through play, but play at this stage doesn’t require a lot of pals. “At this age, toddlers generally engage in ‘parallel play’ rather than ‘cooperative play,'” Hargis explained. “Two toddlers on a play date may have a lot of fun, but they are playing with toys side-by-side rather than deciding how to work together to solve problems. Parallel play is something parents do with their toddlers pretty instinctively, anyway. At this age, there’s no need to worry about a lack of peer interaction.”
Safe, dependable group care for kids is an essential service because it allows parents to work and can be a critical way to connect young children with health services, meals, etc. But from a purely developmental perspective, it is not necessary for young kids developmentally. That is one reason why studies generally don’t bear out the idea that preschool programs have the kind of procial, emotional, and educational benefits experts once believed they might have.
So while taking care of young children during a year of lockdown has been exhausting, parents should take heart that they’re giving their toddlers everything they need emotionally and developmentally. “I think parents underestimate how much they can do with their kids in their home,” said New York City-based clinical psychologist Becky Kennedy.
But parents: Check in on your stress levels.
Decades of research have shown that parental stress and depression can hamper children’s emotional and behavioral development. So while experts generally aren’t concerned that toddlers are missing major developmental milestones during the pandemic, they are worried that parents could unintentionally transfer fears and anxieties to their toddlers. As Kennedy put it: Young children do “notice and perceive everyone’s feelings and everyone’s stress.”
But that does not mean parents should hide all of their struggles and emotions from their young children. If anything, they should be more open. Without that, Kennedy said, without “talking to our kids about the changes they notice, about the stress in their home, about the schedule changes, about why we wear masks, about why we can’t see certain people … then our kids store all the stress in this kind of ‘corona’ year without having a story from parents to explain it.”
And that combination of noticing changes and stress around them without a trusted adult explaining (in a developmentally appropriate way) what is happening could lead to self-blame and self-doubt, Kennedy warned. Toddlers may think they’ve caused these changes themselves or doubt that they’ve somehow misjudged everyone’s emotional state. So toddler parents — who are under significant stress these days — need to lookat their emotional state and get help if needed. That’s no easy task for families already juggling so much, but it is crucial.
It’s also vital that parents be calm and reassuring in having open, validating conversations with children about COVID-19 and the functional changes it has introduced to their lives and ask them what they know. And if they don’t much want to talk about it or don’t seem to care, don’t push it! Kennedy said to the nk of your toddlers’ behavior as a “window” into their inner life. So if you’re concerned the past year has been detrimental to them emotionally, tune into changes in such matters as sleep, tantrums, and sibling rivalry. “The biggest thing we look at is how does a kid function? Kennedy said. “And what is a toddler supposed to be doing? Can the kid still play? Can the kid still have some joy? If parents are struggling, or they think their kid is struggling, I would remind them that there are a lot of opportunities to get help.”
