Last Wednesday was a big day for the Sussman and Frankel family. It was the first day of school at California Creative Academy, a charter school in Los Angeles where 5-year-old Eli is newly enrolled in kindergarten.
“We were super freaked out,” Mollie Sussman told NPR, referring to herself and her husband, Brad Frankel. “We were really scared and [Eli] was pretty scared” leading up to the milestone, she said.
Among her fears was that Eli, an only child, might feel overwhelmed by the transition from a small preschool to a new elementary school with kids up to the eighth grade. She worried that he might cry, that he might have a meltdown, or that he wouldn’t handle the structure of a kindergarten day with no naps.
But after participating in a class activity, where they traced outlines of one another’s hands, Sussman and her husband eased out of the classroom with no issues. “He was ready when we left. He did really well and he was super brave.” In fact, she said laughing, the only one in their three-member family who shed a tear that day was her husband.
Sussman and Frankel are not alone in their anxiety. Eli is one of more than 3.6 million children born in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic who are walking into elementary schools across the country this fall. They’re children who came into a world full of masked adults dousing themselves in hand sanitizer. Many spent the first year of their lives either in isolation in lockdowns or with only a handful of trusted people in their bubbles. And the long-term impact on these “COVID kindergartners” remains unclear.
Research shows that early childhood experiences can have lasting effects on development and growth, according to a 2023 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics (JAMA Pediatrics). While nurturing experiences can increase cognitive capabilities and academic achievement, early life disadvantages can lead to a persistent deficit in skills to manage adversity, stress and self-esteem. It follows then, that parents, experts and educators are hypervigilant, tracking how the hardships of the pandemic may manifest in this generation.
“Just being in utero during a highly stressful time had some developmental effects on infants,” Dani Dumitriu, a pediatrician and neuroscientist at Columbia University and chair of an ongoing study on pandemic newborns, told NPR. “They weren’t large effects but that was a very worrisome sign given that so many women gave birth during that period.”
Dumitriu’s research, published in 2022, found that 6-month-old infants born during the early months of the pandemic had slightly lower scores on a screening of their gross motor, fine motor and personal social skills, compared with a historical cohort of infants born before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“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 said, explaining that mothers filled out a standard developmental questionnaire providing the data for the study.
But, Dumitriu said, as they’ve continued to track these children and expanded the study to include more kids born pre-pandemic, they have found that the COVID babies quickly caught up. “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 said. “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
Sussman said these findings parallel her family’s experience. As working parents, Sussman and her husband enrolled Eli in day care at 11 months. He’s since been enrolled in nursery school and pre-K. He seemed to be meeting all of the established metrics, but at about 2 years old, Sussman realized Eli wasn’t speaking at the level that her mommy apps told her he should be. “There were for sure a number of words you should know by a certain time and he didn’t know them,” she said.
A 2023 study published in Epic Research found that children who turned 2 between October and December 2021 were about 32% more likely to have a speech delay diagnosis than those who turned 2 in 2018. That rate increased dramatically, up to nearly 88%, for children who turned 2 between January and March 2023. Overall, the speech delay diagnoses increased from an average of 9% of children in 2018 to nearly 17% in the first quarter of 2023.
Sussman immediately sought help and enrolled Eli in speech therapy, where she was relieved to hear that this was a common issue. “The speech therapist said that they had seen an increase in the number of kids coming to speech therapy. Likely because of the lack of exposure to mouths and facial expressions, because it’s a big part of how you learn to talk.”
By the time Eli turned 3 “he was so much more verbal and really in a great place,” Sussman said.
Pandemic behaviors and habits that can spell trouble for kindergartners
Other effects of the pandemic and subsequent social-distancing practices have led to lingering, potentially detrimental behaviors in children, which can show up in kindergarten or much later, according to Dumitriu.
Among the most important is parental stress, Dumitriu said. “Many studies around the world show there’s a very well-described intergenerational effect of maternal stress during pregnancy on the developing child,” she said.
Children also spent more time on screens during lockdown than they did in a pre-pandemic world and that can make them less ready for school, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Michelle Yang, a resident physician with Children’s Hospital of Orange County who studied screen time use in kids, said there are many dangers associated with television electronic devices for children ages 2 to 5 years. “Exposing children at this age to two to three hours of screen time showed increased likelihood of behavioral problems, poor vocabulary, and delayed milestones. This is especially true for children with special needs,” she wrote in an article providing guidelines for parents.
School attendance and preschool enrollment levels have also suffered since the pandemic. The U.S. Department of Education’s most recent study on attendance found that the rate of chronic absenteeism — which is when students miss 10% or more of school — averaged 28% across the country during the 2022-2023 school year.
The results of the changes in behavior and habits are reflected in test scores, Kristen Huff, head of measurement at Curriculum Associates, a company that provides national grade level testing, told NPR.
“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 said.
According to the company’s 2025 State of Student Learning report, the percentage of 5-year-olds who are arriving kindergarten-ready in reading has declined by 8 points since 2019 — from 89% to 81%. The declines are even greater in math. Only 70% of kindergarten students are testing at expected grade level, compared to the 2019 cohort, which was at 84% in 2019. The disparities are deeper still when broken out by race and income. Since 2023, majority Black and majority Hispanic schools continue to show a steady increase in test scores across most grades, but their test scores remain well below their white counterparts. The same is true for students whose families live on incomes below $50,000 per year versus those living above $75,000 annually.
The good news, Huff said, is that students are making strides. But while they’re growing at comparable rates to pre-pandemic, the improvement is not enough to make up for the academic ground that has been lost, she added.
“That is why we need to focus on that acceleration in the rate at which they’re learning,” Huff said.
Like Dumitriu, Huff focuses on the malleability of children’s brains as well as the expertise of educators. They just need the right resources.
“We know what works,” she said. “We know what is needed in classrooms, in schools and for students and to support teachers. And when those things are in place, these schools — even when they’re in low-income communities — can buck the trend.”
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