Last week, the CDC revised its guidance regarding mask wearing for vaccinated Americans, as well as for children and teachers in K-12 educational institutions. Much ink has been already spilled about this recommendation, and the debates about whether masking children is abusive or not masking them is criminal have been fierce.
One angle that has been sorely lacking in the discourse surrounding kids and masks is a discussion of trade-offs. This is always hard when it comes to assessing risk to kids; the idea of any child, anywhere, suffering disease, injury or death is very difficult to fathom. We’d rather not think about it. When we do think about it, we feel moved to do whatever we possibly can, no matter how small or inconvenient, to prevent any child from being hurt. This is normal and good: we are built to become beside ourselves at the thought of children suffering. The human species has endured in no small part because adults are highly motivated to care for their young for a very long time.
But I think it is crucial to match the commendable impulse to protect children with a rational assessment of trade-offs: there are consequences for any action. What are we missing when we implement a particular policy? When we go down a particular path, what are we necessarily giving up?
I have two daughters, 8 and 4, who have worn masks at school and daycare for the past year. I have also been teaching in a masked preschool/elementary environment, in person, since last June. And both my personal experience and my professional knowledge make it plainly clear that masks are not zero-cost.
Masks require additional time and attention, and if you know kids (or parents!) you know that these two assets are already in grievously short supply. They are one more thing to purchase, keep track of and maintain. Both my kids and my students have been very responsible about masking, but the damn things still slide down, or get misplaced, or need washing, or are forgotten. Masks require additional time and labor. In the classroom, I spend about 10% of my time interacting with kids on something mask-related. It's not a huge amount of time, but it's not insignificant.
Masks make talking to people harder. In a quiet room with other adults, this is not an insurmountable obstacle, but in a classroom with kids, this is a significant difficulty. Masks dampen the sound of the human voice by as much as 20 decibels. In a classroom that is already noisy and unavoidably “busy”, this can make it very hard to hear the person speaking. Masks also obscure the physical cues that we might use to both decipher someone else’s speech and make our own words clearer.
As a teacher, I have a much harder time talking to kids (and I'm in preschool, so I do not lecture groups). I often have to get closer and physically touch kids to get their attention or communicate things. The things I say have to be simpler, which negatively affects the complexity of the language that I can model for them. When kids talk to me I sometimes miss what they say. I often have to ask them to repeat themselves, which makes everyone feel frustrated. It also takes me longer to discern how a child is feeling or what they are thinking. This makes it harder for me to figure out what kids know now and what they might need to know next. Masks make it harder for me to know who my students are as learners.
When kids talk to each other, they have to be louder. They often misunderstand or simply do not hear each other. It's harder to collaborate and easier to fight. Kids get frustrated and give up on their peers a lot more easily. It's much harder for younger kids to make friends — largely, I think, because masks make it harder to tell people apart. I have noticed that kids take longer to learn others’ names. Both my co-teacher and I have always gone by our first names with our students, and this has never been a problem. This past year, though, most of our students have been calling us “teacher.” With masks on, we’re just another adult body in the room.
Because kids can't easily hear each other’s words, or use their faces to communicate, emotions become bigger. You see this happen in pre-verbal children: toddlers have huge reactions not just because their emotional regulation is immature, but also because, in the absence of words they can communicate, they need to make sure they are understood. When you can’t articulate the case for wearing a particular pair of shoes, you will put your energy into objecting loudly and persistently to all the undesirable pairs. Masks limit children’s ability to use verbal communication, so they begin acting younger. This makes them feel less competent and capable, which affects their ability to learn.
Another factor that affects kids’ learning is the feeling of closeness and trust with both adults and peers. Masks make it harder to decipher emotion, make people appear less trustworthy, and engender less closeness. We trust a masked person less than an unmasked one. For young kids, this is hugely important because until the emergence of abstract thinking (usually around puberty), learning is an emotional process. Young children learn through mimicry, and picking up a new skill is a whole-body endeavor: kids' brains mirror the whole person of the teacher, from the emotional tone to the body language. To be able to learn, kids need to be able to see themselves in the teacher, to identify the teacher as trustworthy, reliable and sufficiently similar to them. By obscuring the main non-verbal conveyor of emotion, the face, masks make interaction, communication and learning more difficult in ways that body language alone cannot compensate for.
Young children have overwhelmingly been spared the brunt of the COVID-19, and their adult caregivers, at least in the US, have near universal access to vaccines. Still, kids under 12 cannot yet become vaccinated, and new variants of the virus are circulating. Masks may make sense in some cases next year. But before we can assess that this is the case, we need to understand what the trade-offs are. Masks make it harder to talk, harder to play and harder to learn. Let's make sure the benefit they provide is worth it.