The Pandemic and Preschoolers: COVID Kids and How Libraries Can Support Them

Abstract

Librarians around the nation must learn how to address preschoolers in a post-pandemic world.

In an article called “COVID Babies,” Adam Clark explores various ways that the pandemic has affected children’s development. Clark begins with a vignette about a two-year-old named Charlie who is in speech therapy to help him learn to speak more than one-word utterances. Nancy Polow, one of the speech pathologists interviewed in the article, notes, “I have never seen such an influx of infants and toddlers unable to communicate. We call these children COVID babies.”

Shuffrey et al. studied two cohorts of babies born shortly after the pandemic began: those whose mothers had COVID-19 while pregnant and those whose mothers did not have COVID-19 while pregnant. Compared to an older cohort of children born before the pandemic, both pandemic-era cohorts showed significantly lower scores on gross motor, fine motor, and social skills than the pre-pandemic cohort. While exposure to the virus in utero does not seem to be implicated, the researchers speculated that the stress that pregnant mothers experienced during the first part of the pandemic might have contributed to some of the developmental lags they saw. They urge long-term monitoring of children born during the pandemic to better understand the impact of being gestated and born during this time period.