Mask-wearing in daycares and schools, some parents worry, might prevent their children from properly acquiring communication skills and even hobble their ability to learn to read.
At first blush, this seems to make sense. After all, babies begin to figure out how to communicate in large part by watching people’s faces.
But most child-development experts say parents shouldn’t be concerned that mask requirements during the pandemic could cause their kids to fall behind. The American Academy of Pediatrics points out that “there is no known evidence that use of face masks interferes with speech and language development or social communication.”
That’s because children are highly adaptable; their job is to soak up information, and they do it in many different ways.
“Children in cultures where caregivers and educators wear head coverings that obscure their mouths and noses develop skills just as children in other cultures do,” childhood research psychologist Judith Danovitch recently wrote in The New York Times. “Even congenitally blind children -- who cannot see faces at all -- still learn to speak, read and get along with other people.”
A 2012 study of children under the age of 9 found “no impairment” in the subjects’ ability to identify the expressions of people who had their mouths obscured. The reason: kids at that age prefer to glean information from a person’s eyes.
“In fact,” Danovitch writes, “children with a stronger capacity to discern people’s thoughts and emotions based on their eyes alone exhibit greater social-emotional intelligence.”
Body language, tone of voice and especially the eyes provide valuable communication cues, and children benefit when they have to figure out the subtler ones.
There also is no evidence that masks in schools have a detrimental effect on kids learning to read or participate in class. Some child-development experts believe that mask-wearing during the pandemic actually will help children develop personal discipline as well as understand the concept of social good.
To be sure, it is important for babies to see faces. They start learning to lip-read at about 8 months of age; the “visible articulations that babies normally see when others are talking play a key role in their acquisition of communication skills,” Yale University Child Study Center professor David Lewkowicz wrote in a Scientific American essay.
But this does not mean Lewkowicz is concerned about masked daycare workers impacting their charges’ development. He points out that babies spend much of their time at home, and so, during the pandemic, parents and other at-home caregivers can provide a lot of unmasked attention to “compensate for the perceptual deprivation they experience outside the home.”
For the vast majority of babies and toddlers, William Paterson University psychology professor Amy Learmonth recently told CNN, “as long as they’re getting interaction with their parents in the morning and in the evening, they’re going to be OK.”
-- Douglas Perry