For the first three months of Luca Bustamante’s life, he spent all his time with his mother and father at home. Like other parents of babies born during the COVID-19 pandemic, Mia Bustamante and her husband decided to limit visitors and avoid large crowds. Luca eventually got to meet his grandparents, and then other family, but interaction remained limited, Bustamante says.
“We were so careful for two years, even while I was working in health care and doing rotations through ERs,” says Bustamante, who recently became a physician assistant. Shortly before she was scheduled to return to work and put Luca in daycare, she and her husband contracted COVID and suspect their baby caught it too. “We got it, we made it through and we felt better socializing,” she says. Now that they’ve developed antibodies, they’re seeing friends and family more so their baby can interact with other people.
For a newborn, the first three years of life are crucial to brain development; and babies need to feel safe and secure, be held, spoken to, smiled at, and played with, says Claire McCarthy, a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School: “It’s easy for parents to think that because babies are little and don’t do very much, that it isn’t super important to interact with them – when exactly the opposite is true.”
