For the Sussman and Frankel family, last Wednesday was a significant day. Five-year-old Eli was starting kindergarten at California Creative Academy, a Los Angeles charter school, on the first day of classes.
Mollie Sussman told NPR, “We were super freaked out,” referring to herself and her husband, Brad Frankel. According to her, “we were really scared and [Eli] was pretty scared” before the milestone.
She was worried that Eli, being the only child, would feel overburdened by the change from a small preschool to a new elementary school that had students up to the eighth grade. She was concerned that he could weep, have a breakdown, or struggle to manage the routine of a kindergarten day without naps.
However, Sussman and her husband left the classroom without any problems after taking part in a class exercise in which they traced the outlines of each other’s hands. “When we departed, he was prepared. He was quite courageous and performed incredibly well. She laughed when she said that her husband was the only member of their three-member family to cry that day.
Frankel and Sussman are not the only ones who are anxious. This autumn, Eli is among the more than 3.6 million youngsters born in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic who are entering elementary schools nationwide. These kids entered a world where adults in masks were slathering themselves in hand sanitizer. Many of them lived their first year of life alone during lockdowns or in their bubbles with only a few people they trusted. And it’s still unknown how these “COVID kindergartners” will be affected in the long run.
The Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics (JAMA Pediatrics) published a study in 2023 that found early childhood experiences can have long-lasting effects on growth and development. Early life disadvantages can result in a lasting lack of ability to deal with stress, hardship, and self-esteem, even while caring experiences can improve cognitive capacities and academic accomplishment. As a result, parents, professionals, and educators are extremely watchful, monitoring how the pandemic’s effects might materialize in this generation.
According to Dani Dumitriu, a doctor and neuroscientist at Columbia University who chairs a study on pandemic neonates, “just being in utero during a highly stressful time had some developmental effects on infants,” she told NPR. “They weren’t large effects but that was a very worrisome sign given that so many women gave birth during that period.”
In comparison to a historical cohort of infants born prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 6-month-old infants born in the early months of the pandemic had marginally lower scores on a screening of their gross motor, fine motor, and personal social skills, according to Dumitriu’s research, which was published in 2022.
She explained that the data for the study came from moms completing a typical developmental questionnaire. “We’re talking about things like baby being able to sit up, baby being able to reach for things, maybe engaging in a face-to-face interaction, very basic things,” she added.
However, as they have kept tabs on these youngsters and extended the study to include more children born before the pandemic, they have discovered that the COVID newborns have rapidly caught up, according to Dumitriu. “The good news is that it looks like that trend really is restricted to the early pandemic phase of 2020 and did not continue past that year.”
“A child’s brain is extraordinarily plastic or malleable,” she stated. “One of the important things about child development is that what happens at 6 months is not predictive of what happens at 24 months and it’s not predictive of what happens at 5 years.”
Eli’s journey
According to Sussman, these results are similar to what happened to her family. When Eli was eleven months old, Sussman and her husband, who were both working parents, registered him for day care. Since then, he has been enrolled in pre-K and nursery school. At around two years old, Sussman noticed that Eli wasn’t speaking at the level that her mommy apps suggested he should be, even though he appeared to be meeting all of the established benchmarks. “There were for sure a number of words you should know by a certain time and he didn’t know them,” she continued.
infants who turned two between October and December 2021 had a roughly 32% higher chance of receiving a speech delay diagnostic than infants who were two in 2018, according to a 2023 study published in Epic Research. For children who turned two between January and March 2023, that rate rose sharply to about 88%. In total, the percentage of children diagnosed with speech delay rose from an average of 9% in 2018 to almost 17% in the first quarter of 2023.
Upon learning that this was a typical problem, Sussman promptly sought assistance and enrolled Eli in speech therapy. “The number of children attending speech treatment has increased, according to the speech therapist. Since facial emotions and mouths have a significant role in how one learns to speak, it is probably due to the lack of exposure to them.
“He was so much more verbal and really in a great place,” according to Sussman, by the time Eli turned three.
Pandemic behaviors and habits that can spell trouble for kindergartners
According to Dumitriu, further consequences of the epidemic and the social distancing measures that followed have caused children to exhibit persistent, potentially harmful tendencies that may manifest in kindergarten or much later.
Parental stress is one of the most significant, according to Dumitriu. “Many studies around the world show there’s a very well-described intergenerational effect of maternal stress during pregnancy on the developing child,” she stated.
According to a research in the journal Nature, children spent more time on screens during lockdown than they did before the pandemic, which may have affected their readiness for school. According to Michelle Yang, a resident physician at Children’s Hospital of Orange County who has researched children’s screen time, children between the ages of two and five are at risk from a variety of television-related electronic gadgets. “Children at this age who were exposed to two to three hours of screen time were more likely to experience delayed milestones, low language, and behavioral issues. In an article offering advice to parents, she stated that this was particularly true for kids with special needs.
Since the epidemic, there has also been a decline in preschool enrollment and school attendance. The rate of chronic absenteeism, which occurs when students miss 10% or more of class, averaged 28% nationwide during the 2022–2023 academic year, according to the most recent attendance study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education.
Kristen Huff, chief of measurement at Curriculum Associates, a company that offers national grade level testing, told NPR that test scores reflect the changes in behavior and habits.
“Since school returned after the pandemic, even students who were not in school because they were too young to be in kindergarten during the [lockdowns] are coming into kindergarten behind or less prepared rather than their pre-pandemic peers,” Huff stated.
The percentage of 5-year-olds that arrive kindergarten-ready in reading has decreased by 8 points from 2019 from 89% to 81%, says the company’s 2025 State of Student Learning report. In arithmetic, the decreases are considerably more pronounced. Compared to 84% of the 2019 cohort, just 70% of kindergarten pupils are testing at the expected grade level. When categorized by race and income, the differences are even more pronounced. Although test results at majority Black and majority Hispanic schools have been steadily rising since 2023 throughout the majority of grades, they are still far lower than those of their white peers. The same is true for students whose families make less than $50,000 annually as opposed to those who make more than $75,000.
According to Huff, the good news is that pupils are improving. Even though their growth rates are similar to those before the epidemic, she said, the progress is insufficient to make up for the lost scholastic ground.
“That is why we need to focus on that acceleration in the rate at which they’re learning,” Huff stated.
Similar to Dumitriu, Huff emphasizes both the knowledge of teachers and the flexibility of children’s minds. All they require are the appropriate resources.
Her words, “We know what works,” “We are aware of the needs of schools, classrooms, students, and teachers. And when those conditions are met, these schools can defy the norm, even if they are located in underprivileged areas.
Copyright 2025 NPR
