Covid-19 has formed and impacted a huge part of our daily lives, from the elderly to newborn babies. The wearing of face masks to slow the transmission of the virus has been one of the most apparent changes in our lives. There are unquestionable health benefits related to the use of facemasks, however the question arises, does the use of these face coverings by children in particular have the potential to impair their development?
In early childhood development, children go through sensitive periods where language and emotional development are rapidly developing. With the mandatory wearing of face masks by these children in kindergartens, day care centres and schools, parents in particular are concerned about their health.
Professor Kang Lee of the applied psychology and human development department at the University of Toronto has studied the development of facial recognition skills in children. He highlights three potential issues that might occur due to facemasks in the interaction of children with their classmates or teachers.
Firstly, he mentioned that kids below the age of 12 may have difficulty recognising people, as they tend to focus on individual features of the person. Secondly, Lee pointed out potential problems with emotional recognition and social interaction. He stated “a lot of our emotional information, we display through movement of our facial musculature” and with masks, that musculature and thus the information will be obscured. The last issue Lee brought up was speech recognition. He said even though speech communication is thought of to be taking place through phonetics and sound, a large portion of the information can actually be communicated visually. Therefore, the wearing of masks has the potential to impair speech recognition in children, as they will be unable to notice the visual clues present in a conversation.
Dr. David Lewkowicz, a senior scientist at the Haskins Laboratories and the Yale Child Study Center, has studied lip-reading in babies. He states that around the age of six to eight months, as babies start babbling, they tend to focus on the “person’s mouth” instead of on the eyes. They try to “master their own native speech, getting not only auditory cues but visual.”
Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Child Emotion Lab has also stated that in fact being able to use others’ verbal or facial cues to figure out how someone is feeling or pick up on safe or dangerous aspects of environments and people around them is a crucial task for young kids. Masks therefore have the potential to impair children’s ability to pick up on such cues.
However, although masks can pose potential developmental problems, many scientists have found that the gravity of such interferences, while present, are not significant – especially in the long term and do not outweigh the risk of potential death from Covid-19.
A study was carried out by Ruba during the pandemic where she and her co-author showed more than 80 children (aged seven to 13) photographs of faces that were either unobstructed, covered by a surgical mask or wearing sunglasses. The three faces displayed emotions of sadness, anger or fear. Ruba then asked the children to assign one of six emotions to each face. The results showed that the children were correct in their responses about uncovered faces 66% of the time. With faces covered by masks, the children had trouble but were able to correctly identify sadness about 28% of the time, anger 27% and fear 18%. These percentages were higher than the odds (approximately 17%) of correctly guessing one emotion out of the total six labels.
Considering these findings, as well as children’s innate ability to adapt to dynamic situations and surroundings, some scientists do not suspect any long-term impacts of masks on children’s development.
Dr Hugh Bases, a clinical associate professor of paediatrics at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone Health is one of the experts not too concerned with the effects of mask-wearing. He states “we will quickly recover” from whatever impact mask wearing has had.
Similarly, Amy Learmonth, a professor of psychology at William Paterson University in New Jersey said balancing the risk of someone dying from coronavirus with potentially slow social and language development in children “just doesn’t seem worth it to me … when all the evidence we have indicates that they will catch up and they will be OK”.
Dr. Lewkovicz states while “masks are not a great thing for communication in young kids”, the time children spend at home with people who are not masked will give them a chance to practice picking up the visual cues. He advises parents as well as teachers to try and “encourage their kids to communicate more through gestures,” for example via interactive games, if they are worried for their child’s development.
“We should give more credit to our own children,” Eva Chen, a developmental psychologist and an associate professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, says. She adds “that being covered for a few hours every day isn’t going to make them less able to recognise social expressions.”
As such, it can be concluded that masks may have some potential developmental impacts on growing children; however, the effects can be easily recovered from and are currently not a major point of concern for various experts.
Recent Comments