"Every September brings a familiar headline: Are kids ready for school? This year's headline is all about the " COVID kindergartners." The story goes like this: Toddlers who grew up in lockdown missed out on crucial socialization and now enter school with some social and emotional deficits, which teachers are going to have to deal with. "Oh no! The COVID babies didn't socialize. They didn't learn to share! Do they have language skills?""
"But here's what's often missing from the story: Toddlers don't actually socialize much with other toddlers. From age 0 to 3, most children parallel play. They sit side by side and build their own block towers. Playdates and preschool enrich development, but they're not the whole story. Did COVID impact today's kindergartners? Absolutely, but not in the way it's being reported. The real back-to-school story this year isn't about the children. It's about their parents."
"Becoming a parent is always a profound shift. It's joyful, but also stressful and disorienting. New parents rely heavily on community: grandparents who drop off dinner or friends who stop by to rock the baby. COVID stripped that away. Many new moms found themselves giving birth without a partner in the delivery room. Carefully imagined birth plans were rewritten overnight. Postpartum visits with grandparents were canceled. Pediatric checkups were fraught with fear. A trip to the grocery store felt dangerous."
"In psychology, we define trauma not only as danger, but as profound uncertainty and helplessness, survival fears, and aloneness. Pandemic parenting checked all of these boxes. Parents expected one kind of beginning, and got something radically different. That mismatch between expectation and reality is destabilizing. It wires the nervous system to stay on high alert. And when you're first learning how to be a parent, that kind of hypervigilance makes everything harder."
Every September raises questions about children's readiness for school, with recent attention on so-called "COVID kindergartners." Toddlers ages 0–3 mostly engage in parallel play rather than true socialization, so missed playdates are not the whole issue. Pandemic conditions removed community supports for new parents, altered birth and postpartum experiences, and made routine tasks feel dangerous. Those circumstances produced profound uncertainty, helplessness, and isolation that meet psychological definitions of trauma. The mismatch between expected and actual beginnings wired many parents into hypervigilance, which reshaped parenting behavior and influenced children's adjustment into school environments.
Read at Psychology Today
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