Do masks harm your child’s development?

For young children, the pandemic comes at a crucial time for developing skills important for empathy, safety and more -- a phase that some parents worry will be impaired by mask-wearing.

“There are sensitive periods in early childhood development in which language development and emotional development are really rapidly developing for the first few years of life,” said Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Child Emotion Lab. 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 is a critical task for young kids, Ruba added. Concerns that wearing masks might interfere with these natural learning experiences and communication skills have been studied before the pandemic. When children ages 3 to 8 viewed faces covered with face masks, they didn't show any impairment in classifying the expressions, according to a 2012 study published in the journal Cognition. This suggested that children under 9 preferred studying the eyes area even when they could see full faces, the researchers wrote. During the pandemic, Ruba, too, has studied whether masks affected children's abilities to understand facial expressions. Ruba and her coauthor showed more than 80 children ages 7 to 13 photos of faces that were unobstructed, covered by a surgical mask or wearing sunglasses. The faces displayed sadness, anger or fear.

When asked to assign one of six emotions to each face, the children were correct about uncovered faces 66% of the time, the researchers found. When faces were covered by masks, the children had trouble but were able to correctly identify sadness roughly 28% of the time, anger 27% and fear 18%, which was more than the odds (about 17%) of correctly guessing one emotion from the six labels. Given these findings and children's innate flexibility in adapting to challenges or catching up, some experts aren't suspecting any long-term effects of mask-wearing on children's development. “I think once masks are gone or almost gone, whatever impact it has, we'll quickly recover,” said Dr. Hugh Bases, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Hassenfeld Children's Hospital at NYU Langone Health. If children's “social and language development is a little bit slower, which it could be, balancing that with the risk of someone dying of the coronavirus -- when all the evidence we have indicates that they will catch up and they will be OK -- just doesn't seem worth it to me,” said Amy Learmonth, a professor of psychology at William Paterson University in New Jersey. “I look at the numbers of people who have died in this country, and it's horrifying.”