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Do you remember the rock opera Tommy from The Who? Tommy was a boy nobody could understand. Deaf. Mute. Blind. But a pinball wizard. His mother tried to help him. There was a really bizarre movie from the album. Here in the autism community, our goal has been to reduce the number of children struggling with autism. But now we have to ask ourselves, are we going to do it PURPOSE. Take a look at the parallels between autism and what happens to school children who wear masks, sometimes throughout their school career, at an age when they are still developing. If there’s a Tommy remake, maybe Anthony Fauci can play Uncle Ernie …..
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From the Atlantic: How schools can help children make friends through masks
After the third day of kindergarten, my son Huxley reported that another child had kicked him in the playground. It wasn’t a big deal; something like that happens. But on the fourth day he had a new frustration: he couldn’t find out who had kicked him. The child had been wearing a purple mask at the time of the incident, but no one in Huxley’s class was wearing a purple mask the next day.
With all the things to worry about in 2021, it had never occurred to me to worry about the social impact masks could have on my son; I was so relieved that his San Francisco public elementary school was going to need it. But here we were. Huxley could not distinguish his new classmates; he had trouble hearing her; he wasn’t sure they could hear him; and around noon he became particularly disorientedhe said, because then all the children took off their masks. Suddenly they looked like brand new people. Usually he’s pretty good at making friends, but the confusion scared him.
“Even for adults, it is difficult to recognize faces in masks,” says Changhong Liu, a psychologist at Bournemouth University in the UK who studies face recognition. People process faces holistically, he told me, absorbing all of the features in combination – which is impossible if some of these features are covered by a mask or even sunglasses. And by the age of 14, children are still developing their facial recognition skills.
Some psychologists and educators fear that such Impairment of facial processing can lead to a number of socialization and communication challenges. It can be especially difficult for children to read people’s emotions through masks. And with children who get to know new classmates for the first time in a mask, recognition difficulties can slow down the process of getting to know each other and hinder the building of trust in the long term. England has decided that children in elementary school will not have to wear masks, at least for the time being; According to The New York Times, both Conservatives and Labor are concerned that masks are making communication difficult for children. The World Health Organization also recommended that schools consider potential “psychosocial development” concerns when establishing mask requirements for children ages 6-12. Read the rest at The Atlantic.
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