2024 Bridge Conference

Four years after the Covid shutdowns, are kids just different now? How are the impacts showing up disproportionately for people of various races, ethnicities, identities, and abilities? Is it all “gaps” or did children also learn skills and knowledge we should be celebrating? As afterschool and youth development professionals, we know it’s very difficult to connect outcomes to specific experiences, even decades later. We’re beginning to see research now, but there’s a need for much more, and it’s likely to continue for years into the future, yet we are sensing some trends. For example, the 2-year-old who would have been learning facial expressions in child care instead saw masked faces, and now, at 6, are they connecting with peers in a different way? In this session, we’ll explore our own experiences with the children who were anywhere from 1 to 14 in 2020, how key developmental experiences might have looked different during these 4 years, and what we can do to support the now 5 to 18-year-olds we spend our time with.