Pandemic Babies Are Heading To Preschool in the Fall — & It’s Bringing up a Lot of Worries for Their Moms

I gave birth to my third and final baby on April 3, 2020. While that was a memorable time for me because of the arrival of my son, almost everyone knows exactly where they were on that date because of another reason: the pandemic.

The country began implementing sweeping lockdowns on March 15, 2020 in an effort to “slow the spread” of the virus. For pregnant folks like me, that meant spending those last few weeks, which should’ve been filled with joyous anticipation, full of fear and concern over what kind of world we were bringing our children into. 

It’s four years later, and those babies who entered the world during the months where time stood still are about to head off into the world at large for the first time as they enter preschool. Here’s what their moms are thinking about ahead of this milestone.

As this baby was the youngest of three, I’d already seen both sides of the coin — a normal first day of pre-k for my oldest, the post-Covid first day for my middle daughter (which involved masks and social distancing). But this upcoming school year is something else entirely: It’s the post-post-Covid first day for a generation of kids who have known no other life. 

I can’t help but be a little anxious about what this year will entail. Not only am I concerned about how things will work with outbreaks and illnesses (especially since Covid seems to be in the rearview as it pertains to protections and accommodations), but I’m also worried about how my youngest child, a pandemic native — something I’m calling this first generation of children who were born right during the start of the pandemic, and who have no frame of reference for what time was like before things like virtual learning and frequent masking — will react to being out in the world for the first time. 

Because of the timing of his birth, my son largely spent those first two years of his life at home, with his sisters, my husband, and myself. All of his interactions with friends and family took place over Zoom calls, and eventually during socially distanced picnics outside. I couldn’t even get him registered for anything like t-ball until this year, since many groups changed their rules during the early days of the pandemic, and stopped offering programs geared towards younger kids who had so much trouble with following social distancing and masking mandates. 

And while I watched him struggle to navigate spending time with his peers and being away from the security of his immediate family during this season, it made me start to worry about what the months ahead would hold for him as he was even further removed from our little bubble when he entered school. Will he adapt to being around kids his own age? How will he handle scheduling changes when school flips from in-person to virtual or has to shutter completely due to substitute shortages? And am I the only one bracing for a bumpy start to the school year?

San Diego, California mother Amber Masciorini says she knew in her heart that her son was ready to head to school when she sent him shortly after pandemic restrictions began to loosen in her area. “We were very hunkered down during [the] majority of the pandemic, especially since there was a second surge right around the time I was having my second baby,” she explained, adding that her concerns about sending her pandemic baby off to school were more centered around her fears that he might bring something home to her newborn. 

“Another fear of mine was that the schools were unsure about the continuation of wearing masks and my son has a speech delay,” she continued. “Thinking about him trying to learn language without seeing anyone’s mouths was worrisome. Thankfully, that restriction was lifted just before he started school.”

Like myself, Masciorini also worried about how her son would do without some of the freedoms he experienced at home. “I knew he was used to free play and had never been in a setting where it was necessary to follow directions or be in a set routine,” she explains, adding that this concern prompted her to seek out a preschool that would offer flexibility in the curriculum and plenty of time outdoors, but her fears were soon realized anyway. 

“Sure enough, we endured immediate judgment from the school and the teachers letting us know ‘he’s not interested in curriculum, he won’t sit still and is spending his time alone,’” she recalls of those initial interactions, calling them “heartbreaking”. “For months, he begged me not to bring him to school and wanted to stay home.”

In the end, she opted to switch to a play-based preschool, saying it’s the best decision she’s ever made. It’s true that those pandemic babies weren’t given as much structure as babies born before and after 2020, something that may have had to do with the fact that most parents were in survival mode when they brought their babies home from the hospital, either being thrust into the role of educator while older siblings pivoted to virtual learning, or else tasked with remote work without any additional help with childcare (and sometimes, horrifyingly enough, it was both).

For parents like me who had experienced having a baby before and after the pandemic, there are different reasons for wanting to get those 2020 babies into the classroom. For example, Kara De los Reyes of Long Beach, California said she was looking forward to getting her March 2020 baby into preschool last year because of the differences she was seeing between her and her big sister. “I have an older daughter, so I was able to compare and witness firsthand the effects Covid [and] the pandemic had on my younger child’s development and immune system — I knew she needed to be in school to help learn how to better socialize, communicate, and play with others,” she says. 

Unfortunately, De los Reyes says that her younger daughter has already had Covid twice, and experienced what she says felt like back-to-back illnesses for two years straight, an occurrence she blames on a “pandemic-era immune system.” Still, she is hopeful that preschool will help change that. 

Much like Masciorini, De los Reyes says her baby also struggled with speech issues that she also hopes will be overcome by attending school. “My daughter was slightly late to verbally communicate, which I saw as a big side effect of the pandemic,” she continues. “This made me even more eager to get her into preschool where she could start to learn from others like how to ask questions or take turns when playing.” 

And while she loved that additional one-on-one time she was able to get thanks to giving birth during lockdown — De los Reyes called it “mandated bonding time” — she notes that this new world we’re bringing our kids up in comes with a lot of complications, including those new ones that we never had prior to Covid. “The most obvious concern is every time you get a notification that someone in your child’s school has Covid — the slight spiraling starts. Is she in the class? Did the teachers clean the classroom well enough at the end of the day?”

Since De los Reyes has had her daughter in preschool for the past year, she says she has felt the teacher shortages and price increases firsthand, noting that she had to weigh the benefits of having her daughter in a school setting against what it was costing her to put her there. 

That being said, De los Reyes thinks there are some positives that will come about for this newest generation of kids. “My hope is that they’ll be the most resilient generation yet,” she says. “They’re still too young to fully grasp what they made it through but they are on the other side —  and now we have a whole generation of better hand-washers!”

Writer Irina Gonzalez is looking forward to her son’s preschool experience this fall, and she says he’ll actually be attending class at a local elementary school. As for the germs, Gonzalez says she’s just taking things one day at a time. “Since we’ve dealt with so many of the childhood illnesses kids tend to deal with, and he got his Covid vaccine booster a few months ago, we feel as equipped as we can be to deal with any future sicknesses,” she says, noting that the plan is to continue stay on top of any new Covid boosters and continue to get annual flu shots. 

But even those regular childhood germs are putting a damper on things for this generation of kids, if only because people are so much more aware of the fact that sometimes a case of the sniffles can be so much more. “I do think we are much more cautious as a whole, so even something minor (like a cough) keeps us away from others,” Gonzalez says of canceled playdates and plans. “We’re much more quickly jumping to ‘my kid might have something, so let’s not risk it’ than I think we would have previously.”  

And while germs are at the top of mind for a lot of parents and caregivers sending their kids off to school for the first time, Gonzalez notes that there’s a clear need for better social interactions for this generation of children. “Our kids are still doing mostly parallel play a lot of the time,” she says. “This is something I’ve discussed with several of my son’s daycare teachers as he has moved up in classrooms (based by age), and some of the more experienced teachers have told me that they definitely notice that these pandemic babies are taking much longer to play and interact with each other.”

So, as these pandemic natives start to prepare for the 2024-2025 school year, which will be the first year of preschool for many of them, it seems like socialization and germs are still at top of mind for concerned parents who are sending this most insulated cohort of kids into the classroom. Whether that will help them or hurt them in the long run remains to be seen.