Once More, With Feeling, About Masking Kids
Kids are now getting the shot. It's time to ditch the masks.
Early in the pandemic, masks made sense. There was so much we didn’t know. Compared to the unknowns posed by the virus, masks were a concrete, relatively inconvenient and easily accessible mitigation measure. But the landscape is dramatically different now than it was even a year ago.
Vaccines are widely available for everyone over the age of 5. 60% of adults, including 80% of the adults over the age of 60, who are most at risk, are fully vaccinated. Pfizer just announced extremely promising results from clinical trials of its new therapeutic which, if representative at population-level, cut the risk of hospitalization by 89% among adults with COVID, and reduced the mortality rate to 0. This is a really good time to start thinking about lifting restrictions.
And masks on school kids need to be the first to go, for two very simple reasons: they are unnecessary, and they are harmful.
Masking Kids Is Unnecessary
COVID spares kids. This is an incredible silver lining to the unfortunate reality that we are stuck with an endemic virus that is, on the whole, likely to be twice as deadly as the flu. But kids are spared. Even before the vaccine, at most 2% of pediatric COVID cases resulted in hospitalization, and 0.3% (576 under the age of 17 since the beginning of the pandemic) resulted in death. In contrast, while influenza has a similar mortality rate for kids over 5, it is six times as deadly for infants and toddlers, at 1.8%.
We have never masked, nor closed day cares and schools, nor conducted mass surveillance through testing for influenza before. People at risk were encouraged to get the flu shot, and everyone was urged to voluntarily stay home when sick, and that was it. We understood the risk in context, and we were able to continue living our lives.
Yet COVID seems to have completely destroyed our ability to assess risk. I am wary of mentioning shifting goalposts because the phrase implies some sort of nefarious, conspiratorial intent, and I do not think this is the case. But boy, have the goalposts shifted, as evidenced by this ABCnews piece, which recommends that folks who have gotten their boosters follow “public health measures just a bit longer,” because “Getting a booster shot doesn't guarantee you won't be infected with the coronavirus. But it can help your immune system build protection against severe disease or hospitalization.” I mean, yes? I thought that was the point? How does the goal of unprecedented public health measures shift from an understandable “2 weeks to slow the spread”, to an indefinite “until we can guarantee no risk?”
This is a case of the Politician’s Syllogism: We must do something. This is something, therefore we must do it.
And when it comes to kids and COVID, mask mandates are indeed the wrong thing, which is worse than doing nothing at all.
Masking Kids Is Harmful
Here’s an interesting tidbit: kids are different from adults. Not just in size, immaturity and inexperience, but their brains are functionally and morphologically different. The way kids learn is fundamentally different from the way adults learn. What’s good for the goose is definitely not good for the gosling.
The fundamental difference is that for children, learning anything is a social, emotional and physical act. Humans are an extremely social species with an incredible amount of what Jean Piaget called social knowledge. We have developed complex, highly specific languages that we use to store and transmit a huge trove of man-made knowledge (per Piaget, social knowledge includes things like norms, rules, rituals, beliefs, recipes and strategies, stories, songs, and poetry.)
Any kind of learning that a pre-adolescent child does, happens in a social context: the passing on of social knowledge is of utmost importance for survival. Child brains are primed to carefully observe (since the moment of birth!) the faces and later bodies of their caregivers, teachers and peers, and mimic their expressions, tone of voice, and body language.
Which brings us to masks. The pieces of paper or cloth we have all been wearing for the past year and a half take up a whole lot of real estate. They obscure the entire lower half of the face. When I last wrote about this, I mentioned how masks make communication harder because they both dampen voice sounds and obscure the lips which might otherwise provide additional clues as to what is being said.
But the impact is more severe than that. Masks have a significant negative effect on children’s ability to read other’s emotions. Being attuned to the emotions of those around you isn’t only important for forming and maintaining friendships, but it hits at the very heart of learning. Whenever we teach something, or learn from someone, we engage in a process of emotional alignment. Unconsciously, students mimic the teacher’s facial expression, body language and emotional state. Our mirror neurons start firing, creating a simile of the teacher inside our own brain. (And a good teacher will do the same when interacting with a child, creating a simile of the student inside their brain.) That is how learning happens; but in order for it to happen, we need to be able to see each other’s faces.
Strikingly, the younger the child, the more masks impair their ability to discern emotion. The categorical understanding of emotion (both knowing that tears and down-turned mouth means “sad”, and that “sad” is a negative) is not fixed until about age 5, strongly suggesting that there is a critical period for the development of the ability to read emotion. It stands to reason that toddlers and preschoolers who are not exposed to whole faces in a variety of situations and environments will miss out on the opportunity to refine their understanding of facial expressions, perhaps permanently.
The quality of the emotion expressed during the learning exchange also directly affects thinking. Frequent smiles improve both attention breadth and flexibility. With the part of the face that is overwhelmingly involved in expressing positive emotion concealed by masks, both teachers and students are missing an important tool for improving cognition and learning.
American school kids have already lost more than twice the instructional time that other developed countries lost to COVID closures. They are, on the whole, several months behind expectations in both English and Math. Having finally returned to classrooms, they are handed a physical barrier to place on the second-most critical (after the brain) body part for learning: their face. This was laughably unnecessary at the beginning of the school year, when all vulnerable adults had already had ample opportunity to be vaccinated. Now that the vaccine is available for school children, masks are indecently cruel. Take ‘em off!