Bonding with a child born during pandemic times

No one in Ms Deena Al Mahbuba's family has met her daughter, Aara.

She was born at the end of 2019, extremely premature. By the time Aara left the hospital for her home outside Boston in mid-June, the world was already months into Covid-19 lockdowns.

Ms Mahbuba's close relatives, along with her husband's, all live in Bangladesh. The couple moved from there in 2013.

Family members have done their best to stay connected, but Ms Mahbuba, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wishes her relatives were nearby.

Her elder siblings could help her soothe Aara when she is sleepless. Or they could show her how they introduced foods to their babies. Aara, now 15 months old, struggles with new foods after having been tube-fed in her early life.

Ms Mahbuba also hopes Aara will learn to speak Bengali, but worries she needs exposure to the language from people besides her parents.

"Sometimes, I feel really sad," she said. "I feel like there is a gap happening and, sometimes, I worry this gap is going to be stretched out day by day."

Even grandparents, aunts and uncles in the same country as babies born during the pandemic have been kept away by travel restrictions and other precautions.

Dr Darby Saxbe, an associate professor at the University of Southern California, said her laboratory last spring started following 760 expectant parents to study their mental health, social connection and other factors. In open-ended survey responses, many participants reported they had not been able to see extended family.

The first pandemic babies are becoming toddlers this season, which means entire infancies have passed while children and their parents were isolated from their loved ones.

But even as families mourn the missed cuddles, experts say the gap is not likely to have any long-term effects. Kids and their relatives can make up for lost time when they reunite. In the meantime, families can take steps to keep those missing relatives present in a child's mind.

Infancy is an important window of time for bonding, said Ohio State University child psychology professor Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan. "It is the period during which children are biologically predisposed to form close relationships with important caregivers," she said.

This is an element of attachment theory, an area of psychology research that has been around for decades.

Studies suggest that babies are primed to bond tightly with one or more caregivers. Once a child has a strong attachment to someone, that person becomes a "secure base", the theory goes. The child looks to that person for reassurance in moments of distress. In calmer times, secure attachments give kids confidence to explore and learn from their environments.

But relatives who miss this window do not need to worry, Prof Schoppe-Sullivan said. The theory says that when infants form secure attachments, they are also forming the capacity for relationships in the future. That means the bonds parents have forged with their babies during coronavirus-induced isolation may help those babies connect with relatives who live far away - whenever they finally visit.

And today's infants and toddlers will not recall these absences. The elder siblings of the pandemic babies may not remember a gap in visits from Nana, either. Because of childhood amnesia, most people remember few events that occur before age three or so.

"The child will not remember who attended their first or second birthday party," said psychologist Lorinda Kiyama, associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

When long-absent family members get to meet the children, it will be important to take their time building a relationship, said Dr Carola Suarez-Orozco, a professor of counselling psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who has studied the effects of family separation on immigrant children. "Help the adults slow it down when they first encounter the baby."

First, prime the relatives for some amount of rejection from the child, she said. From a child's point of view, "he or she is meeting strangers".

Although younger infants might happily go from one set of arms to another, stranger anxiety develops by eight months or so. This fear of new people usually lasts well into the child's second year.

Prof Kiyama suggested preparing toddlers for meeting relatives by using toys to act out scenes such as picking them up from the airport. You could also keep an empty chair at your kitchen table or leave out a bath towel and tell the child it's going to be grandma's when she visits, she said.

Older toddlers or pre-school-aged siblings who will be seeing relatives after a long absence might like practising what they're going to say. "Give the child a script to follow, with variations for flexibility," Prof Kiyama said. Or share memories of that relative from your childhood.

Now that Ms Mahbuba's family in Bangladesh is in the process of getting their vaccines, she is looking forward to her own reunion.

Her mother-in-law is planning to come to the United States to help out with the baby and Ms Mahbuba cannot wait. "The day will come, hopefully."

NYTIMES