We need to admit that masking kids at school has some downsides

We expect variation in impacts across children. Those who are slightly hearing-impaired, or have more trouble paying attention, may be more affected by the muffled nature of voices through masks. Those kids who struggle more to read emotions may benefit more from getting “whole-face” information and may struggle more with masks, too.

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None of this is intended to scare parents. Kids are resilient, kind of amazingly so. If your child is in school with a mask, you shouldn’t panic—and far, far better to be in person at school with masks than at home without.

So this isn’t a moment to be scared about yet another thing. But what seems quite clear to me in reflecting on this is that masks are not a friendship bracelet. The effects may be small, or mixed across kids, but in the absence of a disease risk, we would not have children mask at school or child care. And these effects are likely larger for younger kids. Which means that there are strong reasons to consider when we will feel the COVID risks are such that we can remove masks, probably even before the youngest kids are vaccine-eligible. Which, basically, means we need to design off-ramps.

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