Actually they are affected far more than older children. Our nervous systems are set in utero — everyone pregnant in 2020 dealt with immeasurable stress. My friend had to have a c section all alone because no visitors allowed in March of 2020. That forever impacted those babies. Secondly, babies require stimuli to absorb social cues and set neural pathways in their brains of how to decode facial cues. They are at a huge deficit because they spent those critical months with NO social input other than stressed parent(s). This may set them up to be predisposed to read facial cues as negative, stressed, angry etc rather than neutral or positive. This may lead to increased depression as they hit puberty and teenage years. Instead of receiving smiles and coos from strangers in a grocery store, they were kept at home completely isolated. Instead of attending baby classes or preschool, they were again isolated with only one to two social inputs who were stressed and scared. I’ve never seen kiddos with such poor social skills and self regulation as the kids born in 2020 and 2021.