One day last year, Jerelyn Peregrine watched her 2-year-old daughter Aki play with another child on the street. While the kids kicked a ball back and forth, Peregrine felt relieved that after months of isolation her daughter could still have fun.
“OK,” she thought. “This hasn’t broken her.”
The toddler had barely interacted with people other than her parents since March. She was about 16 months old when the pandemic began, an age when most children begin to speak, move and play with more confidence. She was “finally starting to come out of her shell,” Peregrine said, when the lockdown began.
Now, Aki has spent more than a third of her life in a world of social distancing. “She does know that she’s not allowed to approach people,” Peregrine said. “If she sees people, she’ll go, ‘People!’ She’ll get up out of the way and kind of rear back. She knows she’s not supposed to get close.”
The family had moved to Montpelier from western Massachusetts about four months after the pandemic began. They hadn’t intended to be part of a wave of new arrivals seeking the relative safety of Vermont’s low case counts. But they faced the same challenge of how to connect with their new neighbors when connecting was off-limits.
Peregrine and her husband both work remotely for out-of-state technology companies. They knew that child care slots in the area were limited and that essential workers needed them, so the couple decided early on that they would keep Aki at home. She has now gone nearly a year without interacting with other kids.
They try to help their daughter act like a 2-year-old at home, Peregrine said. “It’s definitely not a case where we say, ‘OK, we’re working, you go off and be a kid right now.’ We try to be kids with her.”
But they’ve seen hints of what more socialization could do for her. On walks through their neighborhood last summer, running into other kids was a highlight. “She blossomed; she was so happy,” Peregrine said. “So I know that it’s something that she craves, and it makes her more even-keeled. And I feel like without that, she’s much more likely to act out and kind of go bouncing off the walls.”
Desperate for more interaction, Peregrine went on Front Porch Forum in July to look for safe candidates for playdates. “She mostly just wants to kick a ball back and forth and be smiled at by nice people,” she wrote about her daughter. She got plenty of kind notes in reply, she said, but no takers.
Invisible effects
The pandemic has thrown unique challenges at kids of all ages — and their parents. Toddlers aren’t old enough to face the setbacks that have defined the year for school-age kids: virtual classrooms, canceled activities. But parents of young children have still been stressed.
Child care centers were shut down from March through May, except for limited availability to children of essential workers. The state refunded 50% of tuition costs during that time, but parents and children alike faced a jarring change of routine.
Once providers reopened, coverage was patchy. Stringent health guidelines meant kids could be sent home for roughly a week for a common runny nose, and scattered Covid scares and related staffing shortages closed centers for days at a time.
While Vermont supported the sector throughout the pandemic more than most other states, advocates say the system remains underfunded, with educators underpaid and care inaccessible to many who need it.
Parents of quarantined kids now wonder what invisible effects might follow a year of social deprivation during a key developmental period.
Peregrine worries that her daughter will develop more social anxiety the longer the pandemic continues. “I don’t know what I don’t know,” she said. “But I do think that when she can finally socialize, it’s going to take a long time, and there’s going to be some stuff to undo. That’s my suspicion.”
It’s not yet clear what the long-term effects of the pandemic will be on young children, said Dr. Cath Burns, a child psychologist in Essex who is also the clinical director for Covid Support VT. But there are reasons to hope they’ll be mild.
For one, Burns said, parents already provide the structure at home that helps kids thrive. Maintaining a daily routine, with time for sleep, meals and play, provides a feeling of safety. “Kids need that, because that’s how they grow, and that’s how they learn,” Burns said.
Young children will generally make the most of their circumstances, she said. “I’ve worked with kids in institutions. I’ve been in all kinds of environments. And I’m amazed at how resilient children are.”
Still, many families face risks. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prolonged disruptions of child care routines and skipped life events like birthday parties and funerals can cause trauma. Economic insecurity, a widespread result of the pandemic, is also linked to higher rates of child abuse and neglect.
Burns’ broader concern is that kids may become more stressed because their parents are more stressed. On top of health concerns, the pandemic has forced many parents to juggle work and child care, or forced parents — mainly moms — out of the workforce altogether. Those circumstances can have a major effect on household dynamics.
“Remember, our kids watch us,” she said. “And if we’re really stressed out, we’re going to be more reactive. We’re going to be more disoriented. We’re going to just have a harder time regulating our own emotions.”
Acknowledging and addressing that stress is key, Burns said. She encourages her patients to go easy on themselves.
“We’re all going for ‘good enough’ parenting right now,” she said.
‘Another way to be parenting’
The stress of raising a toddler during the onset of a pandemic was only one of Jess Buckley’s concerns last year: In March, she was preparing to give birth to her second child.
“Our midwife was telling us, ‘You really need to consider completely isolating yourself,’” she remembered. “And we’re like, ‘Well, what does that mean?’ Like, nobody’s doing that.”
The state’s stay-at-home order followed, and Buckley’s second daughter was born at the height of the lockdown in April. With her partner working full-time and their parents mostly hindered from helping in person, the spring and summer were “extremely challenging.”
“I’m still processing what that was like,” Buckley said — “that bodily reaction to feeling like I can’t really give my kids what they need. Because it’s just me. And they’re breaking down, and I’m breaking down.”
She, too, took to Front Porch Forum, asking whether any families in the area were interested in sharing child care duties. “I needed another way to be parenting,” she said. The ad didn’t immediately get results, but it helped her clarify what she wanted from a cooperative model. Weeks later, a pod was born.
Buckley’s family is one of four that gather most weekdays, rotating houses and caregivers so the other parents can work.
The group convened in early August and drew up a nine-page list of protocols. The document covers the basics of not only how the pod works, but how its members should behave outside the context of the group — from what a member should do when they experience symptoms of illness, to how they should handle an encounter on the street with an unmasked person. One representative from each family attends a weekly meeting to discuss any recent developments.
Aside from allowing Buckley and her partner to keep their jobs, the system has helped Buckley’s 2-year-old daughter thrive. She’s learned how to play cooperatively and negotiate, and she’s picked up jokes from the other children. “She went in a much gentler person, and she’s come out of it a more overt force of nature,” Buckley said.
The group has also fostered crucial relationships among the parents. “It’s quite a bit of time needed to manage our pod,” Buckley said, “but it’s so valuable and so fulfilling for me to be doing it. I just feel like there’s a way in which we’re supporting one another that is going to continue to have ripple effects into our future and into our community.”
Buckley said she feels sympathy for parents whose circumstances don’t allow for an arrangement like hers — especially as the disconnection brought by the pandemic enters its second year.
“We’re not meant to be doing it alone,” she said. “It really does take a village. It takes a community of people to raise kids.”