Children with speech or language disorders offer perhaps the clearest example of these murky trade-offs. Pandemic restrictions vary by state, county, and school district, but I spoke with parents in California, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, New Jersey, Iowa, and Maryland who said their children’s speech therapy has been disrupted—first by the loss of in-person therapy and then by masking requirements, in places that have them.

Megan’s son, for example, has Joubert syndrome, a rare genetic condition that often manifests in severely delayed speech. At the start of the pandemic, the then-4-year-old could approximate a few simple words, like mom and home, each the hard-won victory of intensive speech therapy he’d received since he was 2. But he regressed a lot during remote therapy, and is still struggling now that therapy is in person, because his therapist wears a face mask. (Megan, who lives in California, asked to be identified by her first name only in order to protect her son’s privacy).

The consequences of leaving speech and language disorders untreated can be profound, Diane Paul, the director of clinical issues in speech-language pathology at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, told me. Children struggling to express themselves can get frustrated, which can lead to behavioral challenges, and they may have trouble making friends. Many kids with speech disorders struggle to learn to read, but “language becomes a medium through which we learn everything later in school,” Alex Levine, a speech-language pathologist at the Learning and Development Center at the Child Mind Institute, told me. And the longer you wait to address a speech or language issue, the harder it is to do so.