Reply to Anyone not bothered that preschoolers are wearing masks?

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Reply to "Anyone not bothered that preschoolers are wearing masks? "

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[quote=Anonymous]1) If you have a child who has been wearing a mask for less than 6 months, I'm not sure your comfort level is what we should be measuring. My kid was 2.5 when the pandemic started, has been wearing a mask daily for two years. I happily taught her to wear a mask and was totally fine with it for a long time -- I wanted to keep her safe, I wanted to keep her teachers safe. I feel differently now. You can say you have no issue with it today, but you might also feel differently in a year or two.

2) Whether wearing the mask itself bothers your individual kid is really only part of it. First, of course there are kids who struggle with masks and continued masking is a big burden on them and their families. It is not easy to get an exemption for a child with sensory issues and would probably mean being placed in a different classroom. A lot of kids just have low level annoyance with it (which is why you see them pulling them below their nose or mouth, chewing on them, or taking them off when they aren't supposed to) but will still wear them. Should that low level annoyance matter to us? I mean, for starters, it should matter because it diminishes the efficacy of mask-wearing, because they aren't doing it correctly.

3) As PPs have mentioned, none of this matters at all if it turns out masking kids under age 6 does not effectively control spread of Covid in group care environments. Which it might not! No one really knows. But those of you who are unbothered might also ask yourselves: if you found out that Covid was BEST controlled in this age group through a strict policy against symptoms at school and a policy where kids were tested every week, would you still want your child to wear a mask indefinitely? Or would you say "oh, that does sound better than masking kids this age, let's do that instead." If there is a better way to do this that doesn't have the downsides of masks, why not do that?

I don't think wearing a mask is the worst thing ever for my kid. I do have moments of concern about it. Like many others, my kid will forget she's wearing her mask or decline to take it off even at home. Sometimes she will do this even if it's making it hard for us to hear or understand her. Sometimes she'll say "I'm wearing a mask to keep you and Daddy safe." I have mixed feelings about this. It reminds me of the ways the pandemic is impacting her that have nothing to do with the mask itself -- with the ways she has accepted a certain kind of life and happily taken on sacrifices for others, and I wonder if one day she will ask whether it was appropriate for her to be expected to do these things. I gently explain to her that she isn't responsible for keeping Daddy and I from getting sick, and that it's okay to take off her mask at home (and that it might even be nice to see each other's faces for a little while). She'll shrug and comply and I'll wonder if I'm doing the right things.

It's really not about being "bothered" or not.[/quote]

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