“Healthychildren.org” recently published a fact-free, data-free claim that children wearing masks doesn’t harm cognitive development. The authors asserted that because there is “no evidence” that masks impede learning, that lack of evidence is in fact evidence that it doesn’t impede learning. Claiming a complete lack of evidence that aliens live on Mars doesn’t prove they don’t live on Mars. That’s not how evidence works.
Parents are reporting that their children are falling behind because they can’t see visual clues on a masked teacher. If a teacher smiles under a mask, the child doesn’t see that smile. Sorry, you can’t really smile with your eyes. This isn’t rocket science. But there is science to the contrary.
From an abstract published a week ago:
Leveraging a large ongoing longitudinal study of child neurodevelopment, we examined general childhood cognitive scores in 2020 and 2021 vs. the preceding decade, 2011-2019. We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic. Moreover, we find that males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected. Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated COVID-19 pandemic is significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.
It’s well-documented (even by the CDC) that healthy children are at a lower risk of health consequences from COVID than from the flu, but masks weren’t ever contemplated as prophylactic during flu season. Why now? Wearing cloth masks that impair speech, impair breathing, and likely won’t retard viral transmission is a net negative.
Speech pathologists are seeing it, too. It isn’t hard to recognize that when we are told to remove visual cues from developing tiny humans, hard-wired into our brains over tens of thousands of years, that that will result in a retardation of learning.
Some “public health specialists” have now recommended wearing masks at home around unvaccinated children. All of my children are adults now, but if we had any school-aged children, they wouldn’t be staring at a pair of eyes with a mask. If teachers at school were wearing masks they would have been taught at home by people without masks.
The psychological damage will manifest soon. Some children will excel. Those children with parents so afraid that they leave a mask on around their kids are suffering untold damage.
Sorry, you can’t “multitask” and you can’t really “smile” with your eyes.
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