The past two years have felt like a never-ending survival game.
Our youngest children were born into this mess - and it's shaping their development.
They are generation COVID's newest members; 118,000 Kiwi babies who have only ever known life in a global pandemic.
"There could be life-long impacts for them," explained paediatrician Dr Jin Russell.
So, how will this mega event shape their development, brains and potentially the rest of their lives?
Neuroscience educator Nathan Wallis said the first 1000 days are crucial for brain development.
"For a lot of children, there are going to be ramifications for the rest of their life," he said.
Aimee Hosking, a first-time mum, said the pandemic flipped everything she thought motherhood would be on its head.
"I'm a lot more fatigued around… all the decisions and trying to protect him," she told Newshub Investigates. "I'm a bit more anxious than I wanted to be."
Lockdowns and the fear of exposing her son Sydney to COVID-19 kept them within the confines of their Papakura home for almost the entirety of his first year of life.
There were no library visits, playgroups and very few coffee catch-ups with other parents. Sydney’s Plunket book is empty.
"He's very clingy," Hosking said. "If I put him down and just come around the bench he'll crawl all the way around - screaming, crying."
Even now leaving the house is difficult - he's developed intense separation anxiety.
"It worries me that I'm his sole teacher and I'm a first-time Mum, I don't know what I’m doing really," said Hosking. "And I wonder what his life's going to be like now."
The Ministry of Education estimates more than 35 million hours of Early Childhood Education was lost due to Covid-19.
Michele Bosch, who operates Peekaboo Childcare, said when the centre opened again after lockdowns, there was delayed social development among some children.
"They haven't been at the parks taking turns on the slides, they haven't been in a childcare environment where they've had to learn the social cues of compromise and negotiation and all of those sorts of things that you would normally expect in those early years.
"We've had just recently one child enroll and at 18 months they have literally probably not left the home."
Ten-month-old Etta was born into the Delta lockdown last year. Her mum Zazi Henderson, a speech and language therapist, said while the extra time at home with parents or caregivers has been hugely beneficial for children - their limited exposure to the world will have an impact on their development.
"I think it's most likely to lead to language delays," she said.
"So that means children not having as many words to put together to create sentences, just purely because they're not hearing them as often.
"I can't say that I don't worry about the impact… Children really are a product of their environment. They are a product of what we put in.
"We do feed in more language when we're having more experiences, when we're out and about, meeting different people, meeting different children, seeing different things."
Dr Russell said masks may have had an impact too
"Children need to be able to see faces," she said. "To develop their language skills they watch our faces to know how to make the sounds. They look for our facial expressions and there’s a sense in which children learn that what they say and how they express themselves matters too from grown ups looking at their faces."
Samantha Hayes' first-hand experience
My own daughter Amaya was born two days after Etta into Auckland's long lockdown.
The isolation meant she didn't meet my dad Paul until she was more than six months old, an experience shared by thousands of families.
But the first time he held her, he was so concerned about COVID-19 that he caught himself - choosing not to kiss her just in case.
We'll never know who caught it first but that weekend we all got COVID-19.
'It can actually embed in their body systems'
At Starship Children’s Hospital in Auckland, Dr Russell has concerns for some of 'Gen C's' babies and toddlers.
Dr Russell said she was seeing "some loss of school readiness skills, going backward in toilet training… and some of the children that I looked after reversed their day/night pattern".
Most of these regressions will be resolved simply with time, but "my concern would be for those children… where there's been high family stress, turn-over in jobs or job loss, knocks to family income, worsening parental mental health - even addiction surfacing", Dr Russell said.
Those factors can trigger what Harvard research calls a "toxic stress response".
"Young children are able to absorb a certain amount of stress and they can deal with it," said Dr Russell. "But if the stress is chronic, constant and they don't get any breaks from it - it can actually embed in their body systems and impact on brain development."
Dr Russell wants to see research carried out comparing pandemic babies to non-pandemic babies to track their social, emotional and academic development throughout their lives.
"I am worried... I'm worried that we didn’t put them first.
"It's those children who are growing up in the most challenging circumstances that I worry about."
Wallis said unless we intervene now and help the children from struggling families, we will all live with the pandemic’s legacy as they grow up.
"It's hard to say that they will recover," he said. "They will produce a brain that is the right brain for their life. And if that's been their life, then that's the brain they will produce.
The good news is that it isn't too late to prevent the worst of the pandemic's impacts.
Children have a high degree of neuroplasticity; it means they can adapt and they can catch up if they're given the support they need.
"I think that we're going to come through this, the other side, and we're going to have some strong children. We can only hope," Henderson said.
"The good thing about this is that it's a shared trauma. The whole country's going through it - so schools are responding to that [and] early childhood centres are responding to that," said Wallis.
"For most children, they'll do really well," concluded Dr Russell. "I really believe that."
Watch Newshub Investigates: Generation COVID in full on ThreeNow.
