By Gwen Paulson 
When I was pregnant with my son in 2019, I looked forward to family gatherings, travel, adventures, and baby play groups. When the pandemic began, everything changed.
Born in empty birthing spaces to masked faces, FaceTime introductions, and cancelled mom groups, the Covid kids are children born around the beginning of the pandemic. The Covid parents, me included, launched our journey into parenthood during an impossible and unprecedented time of confusion, loss, separation, and fear.
As a perinatal therapist with a focus on trauma recovery, I can confidently say we entered parenthood during a time of collective, chronic trauma. There’s no handbook for parenting in a pandemic. But we did it.
As a kindred Covid parent, I invite you to reflect on the past five years, including how far we’ve come from where we started. We conquered milestones in isolation and were forced to redefine the status quo to make family and parenthood work best for us. Through an impossible time when the world felt unsafe, uncertain, and disconnected, we held our babies tight and tighter.
Now, as I prepare for my son to enter his first official year of school, I’m struck by a familiar anxiety. The past several months of ongoing social and political turbulence and daily news of violence have deepened feelings of uncertainty for the state of the world and our country. And again, my vision of this time is forced to shift. My son’s school debut feels like a ceremonial passing of the baton. While the biggest part of me wants to celebrate, it’s hard not knowing what’s next. Our first year of parenthood, we were in the trenches; the village was on lockdown, and no one was coming. How do you retrain your brain to trust?
What I do know is this: we’ve come this far. We’ve built not only the foundation of our children’s growth but also ours as parents. In a baptism by fire, we’ve learned to listen to our intuition and make choices based on what’s best for us, our families, and our children. It hasn’t always looked the way we thought; we know how to change course to parent our own way. We got here with resilience, determination, and grit. We’ll bring the same love, intention, and determination with us in this next step.
Make no mistake, this milestone is tremendous. Yes, the Covid kids are entering kindergarten—and they’re bringing us, their Covid parents, with them.
by Vicki Bahr 
by Laura Leinbach 
