What I Was Watching For in Year One

My son was born in the spring of 2020. He spent the first eighteen months of his life in a world that contained, primarily, two adults. We were careful—more careful than was probably necessary, in retrospect—and the carefulness meant that his social experience was extremely narrow for a period that developmental research suggests is significant. I was watching for delays from early on. Not with panic, but with the attention of someone who had done a lot of reading and was trying to remain honest about what she was seeing. He hit most motor milestones on schedule. Language was slower, which we were told was common and which resolved around eighteen months. What I was less equipped to assess was the social and relational piece—the part that required other children to evaluate.

When He Finally Had Other Children

He was two and a half before he had any meaningful regular contact with other kids. Playgroups started in the fall of 2022. I watched him carefully, the way you watch someone in a foreign country trying to navigate cultural norms they have not learned. He was interested in other children but did not know how to enter their play. He would stand near a group and watch rather than joining. He had a strong preference for adult interaction, where the communication norms were more familiar and more forgiving. He did not do well with the chaos of a group of toddlers whose behavior was unpredictable. Some of this, we were told, was temperament. Some of it was likely related to limited early exposure. Disentangling the two is genuinely difficult, and I have stopped trying.

The Research I Found Most Useful

There is a body of work on what developmental psychologists call "social competence" in early childhood, and the most useful thing I found in it was that the research does not suggest a critical window that closes permanently. What it suggests is that early social experience shapes the ease with which children acquire social skills, not whether they can acquire them. Research from the University of Virginia studying children who had experienced disrupted early socialization found that children who received structured social opportunities with supportive adult scaffolding—meaning adults who helped narrate and interpret social interactions rather than just placing children together and stepping back—showed strong developmental trajectories compared to children who were simply given peer exposure without support. The variable that mattered was not the timing of exposure but the quality of adult involvement during the exposure. This changed how I showed up at playgroups. I stopped hoping he would just figure it out through proximity and started narrating what I was observing. "That boy is building a tower. What do you think he's adding next?" That kind of thing. Slow, specific, supportive.

The Tangent About What I Grieve

I want to be honest about something I do not say often in parenting spaces because it lands wrong: I grieve what he did not have in that first period, even though I understand why he did not have it and even though I do not think we made wrong choices given what we knew at the time. There is something that happened during the pandemic that I cannot undo. I do not know what shape it will take in his development. I do not know if it will matter in any way I can measure when he is fifteen or thirty. But I know that something was different about those first years and that I will probably spend some portion of his childhood watching for the effects and not being fully certain about what I am seeing. This is uncomfortable to sit with. I sit with it anyway.

What He Is Like Now

He is four. He is loud and opinionated and has a best friend at preschool named Theo who he talks about with the intensity usually reserved for beloved pets. He has learned, through practice and support and a lot of time around other children, how to enter play—how to observe, find an opening, and offer something. This is a skill. He did not have it at two and a half. He has it now. A study from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development tracking children born during periods of social disruption found that peer relationship quality at age five was more strongly predicted by the quality of caregiver relationships during disruption than by the amount of peer exposure during that period. The secure base, in other words, was more protective than the exposure itself. He has a secure base. He knows he does. I watch him use it as a launching point rather than a retreat, and this is the thing I hold onto when the worry flares up in the middle of the night.

What I Am Watching For Now

Mostly, I am watching for the things I would watch for in any four-year-old. Whether he is developing the capacity to care about how his actions affect other people. Whether he can tolerate not getting what he wants without falling apart. Whether he is curious about the world in ways that do not require me to structure every experience. He is doing well on all of these. The pandemic baby I worried about is becoming a person I am proud to know. That is what I have to hold onto when I do not know what else to do.