Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Tuesday, November 10, 2020 -- Mattie died 580 weeks ago today. 

Tonight's blurry photo was taken in December of 2007. What was the context behind this photo? Well Mattie just had a tantrum, a full blown melt down. I can't recall what set him off, but once he got calmer, he came into the kitchen to find me. So I lifted him up onto the kitchen counter, to talk with me. I think his impish face says it all, doesn't it?

Quote of the day: Today's coronavirus update from Johns Hopkins.

• number of people diagnosed with the virus: 10,209,870
• number of people who died from the virus: 239,306

I received an interesting email that was forwarded to me from a friend today. The forwarded message was a blog posting from a mom with three children. The mom is concerned about the impact of mask wearing on the development of her three young children. I attached her message below, and then following the message, I highlight what the research seems to suggest.

I am the mother of 3 children. Our youngest is 5 months old. Masks have been a very sore subject with me from the beginning for many reasons. Our oldest is 4 years old. His preschool teachers are required to wear them and our son is extremely troubled by them. He's never seen his teachers' faces! It's a daily struggle to help him deal with this abnormal and disturbing world he all of a sudden lives in. 

While this is endlessly upsetting for me, what has me even angrier is the world our baby has been born into. In her 5 months on this earth, aside from our family,  she has never seen another human face! When we go out in public, she doesn't know that there are human faces and perhaps a smile behind those ridiculous masks. She just sees figures wrapped up like mummies. What must she think of the world? What is she learning about her surroundings? To her, this dystopia is going to be "normal." 

Our baby is extremely alert and engaged, smiles in response to every smile she's given, and studies our faces intently when we talk and sing to her. As a mother, I know you know that this is how babies learn to talk and learn to communicate with facial expressions. Every parent knows this. Doesn't it concern anyone else that millions of babies are being deprived in a significant way of this opportunity to learn and develop? To flourish in the presence of normal human interaction? No one seems to think or care about the psychological and developmental damage these masks are doing to our children and babies. 

 

I found this mom's commentary very interesting! I can't imagine how masks are perceived by children. I know that as an adult, who IS NOT used to wearing a mask, I have difficulties. I find I have trouble understanding what some people are saying, I honestly can't tell peoples' emotions anymore from simple facial expressions, and overall I feel like masks prevent human connectivity. So what are pediatricians and psychologists saying about this topic? Well A LOT actually. Just google it! Lots of articles will pop up. I came across the article entitled, Do Masks Impede Children’s Development? 

Here's the beauty of science! There are always two camps (or more) of thinking on an issue. So below you what both sides are saying...............

Potential Issues

1. Kang Lee, a professor of applied psychology and human development at the University of Toronto, who studies the development of facial recognition skills in children, pointed to three potential problems masks might pose for children in interacting with classmates or teachers. First, he said, kids under the age of 12 may have difficulty recognizing people, because they often focus on individual features.
2. Second, and perhaps more important, he said, “a lot of our emotional information, we display through movement of our facial musculature.” Because that musculature and therefore that information will be obscured by a mask, he said, children may have issues with “emotional recognition and social interaction.”
3. And finally, Dr. Lee said, children may have problems with speech recognition; even though we tend to think of speech communication as taking place through sound, he said, a great deal of information can be communicated visually.
4. David Lewkowicz, a senior scientist at the Haskins Laboratories and the Yale Child Study Center, has studied lip-reading in babies. Around the age of 6 to 8 months, he said, as babies start to babble, they change the ways that they are looking at people who are speaking to them. Instead of concentrating on the eyes, he said, “they spend a lot of time looking at that person’s mouth, trying to master their own native speech, getting not only auditory cues but visual.”
5. In one type of experiment, people are asked to look at multiple faces on a screen, while listening to a voice talking — but the voice is synchronized with only one of the faces. Children as young as 3 already tend to show a preference for that synchronized face, and the preference gets markedly stronger as they grow.

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Children compensate

1. Eva Chen, a developmental psychologist who is an associate professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, focuses her research on children’s cognitive development with respect to social groups. “We should give more credit to our own children,” she said, “that being covered for a few hours every day isn’t going to make them less able to recognize social expressions.” Voices, gestures and overall body language are all important for children, she said. While children typically pay attention to people’s mouths while they are talking, “it’s by far not the only cue children have to communicate and to learn,” she said, and referenced a 2012 study showing that children were able to read facial emotions just as well when a mask was added.
2. In fact, all of the scientists I talked to who have studied the complex ways that children process and use the information hidden by masks also believe that children will find ways to communicate, and that parents and teachers can help them. Several of them also pointed out that children with neurodevelopmental issues such as autism will need special help and special consideration — but also that some of the techniques that parents and teachers already use to help these children learn to interpret social cues may be helpful for everyone when masks are in use.
3. In Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia, it’s standard to wear masks as protection against illness or air pollution. Because there are always a fair number of people wearing masks in public, “culturally, there is not the same level of anxiety — not the urgency to see whether wearing masks interferes with children’s development that we have heard from European colleagues and American colleagues,” Dr. Chen said. People understand, she said, that children will see the full faces of parents and siblings at home.
4. And given the adaptability of children’s brains, it seems reasonable to hope that one effect of spending time masked and around masked people may be that children actually improve their ability to read those other cues. Children may end up “more sensitive to tones, more sensitive to someone’s overall body language,” Dr. Chen said.

I think reading these insights from researchers is helpful, but at the end of the day, no one knows their children better than the parents. I absolutely understand a parent's concern about the long-term impact of mask wearing on child development. In all reality, scientists really do not know the long-term impact on our children in the United States, and only time will tell. I find citing comparisons of the US to other cultures, is like comparing apples and oranges. Mask wearing maybe the norm in other countries but in the United States, this is very foreign to us. It constricts our freedom to use our entire face to communicate and therefore, parents, caregivers, and teachers are forced to learn in real time how best to educate and communicate with our children during COVID-19.