The Daily Caller reports that “The United States Capitol attending physician Dr. Brian P. Monahan said Sunday that masks will not be required inside the Capitol beginning Monday, just one day before President Joe Biden is set to deliver his State of the Union address.”
This one’s a little obvious even for me. #thescience has been politicized from the beginning. That soup brain president will stand up and declare some kind of victory over Covid-19. Not total victory because they may need it later to change how we vote again but enough of a victory to re-elect Slow Joe.
Never mind that children were stuck wearing masks for years while the elites laughed about it. Rules for thee, not for me.
The masks have hurt children. Let’s just take little ones.
Children learn language through auditory and visual cues and when a child, teacher, therapist or caregiver is masked those visual cues are missing. This will likely have a negative impact on language development and growth in children, never mind emotionally.
If a young child is delayed in their speech and language development we would clearly see this if children fail to meet communication milestones designed by the CDC such as the ability to understand language or say a certain amount of words.
Guess what just happened. After 2 decades, the CDC just updated their developmental milestones. Hmmm. Why now? They just lowered all the benchmarks for appropriate language development.
The CDC is now saying that the milestone for 30 months is 50 words as opposed to 50 words at 24 months. So now, a child won’t be referred for early intervention for another six months at a time when early intervention can make all the difference.
But please remember, it’s more important that these folks are covered politically than your children are educated and nurtured.
For parents who are home with their children this isn’t as big of a deal because presumably you’re not wearing your mask at home with your children. At least I hope not. But many parents are forced to work. Many parents are divorced. So these children are stuck in masked daycare all day every day.
We can’t let these parents know that their children are falling behind because of masks and because of the free pre-k. No. There will be few studies publicized exposing this. This will all be covered up. It’s more important that parents feel good about their decision to put their children into masked daycare rather than actually help the children.
March 3, 2022 at 5:52 pm
Matt,
I was curious about this post, so I asked my daughter to inquire of her apartment-mate, a professional children’s speech therapist. Here’s my daughter’s transcription of her reply:
-TRANSCRIPTION-
1. Yes, the CDC did change the milestones, but they’re also changing the way recommendations are made to doctors. Rather than “here’s the average”, it’s now more of a “here’s where to be concerned”. The old guideline was a marker of the average point when children typically hit certain milestones; the new standard identifies precisely when doctors should be concerned about developmental delays. (Think of it as the difference between “here is the average human body temperature” and “here is the temperature at which you should take your child to the emergency room”.) This is a change that’s been in the works (and generally regarded in the profession as necessary) for a long time; it was considered overdue before COVID hit. Basically, it makes things more black and white for doctors making referrals–doctors who, by definition, are not speech therapists. (“And they’re terrible at referrals,” she mutters under her breath.”Oh, let’s wait and see, they’re just a late talker–no! NO! It’s so annoying!”)
2. Masks and speech development: Esmerelda (not her real name) is also curious to see what future research will show, but so far the general consensus appears to be that it’s not much of a concern in school-age kids. It’s more of a concern for children under age 3 who are around mask wearers all day, BUT even there we have caveats. So here’s how this works: there’s a little bit of research indicating very mild effects for very young kids (again, under 3) who are around mask wearers all day. This effect is less than what was expected, probably because (as it turns out) kids are very adaptable and are getting more facial expression cues from people’s eyes than the researchers thought they would. All-day mask-wearing by adults CAN make it slightly harder for young children to acquire language because it’s harder for them to hear adults’ language use clearly and they’re not seeing the whole face. However, the vast majority of kids under 3 aren’t in the extremely specific situation of being around masked adults all day. Most under-3s spend most of their day around unmasked caregivers–parents, grandparents, the lady down the street who runs a daycare out of her house, etc.–so this situation isn’t applicable to them. For these populations, there doesn’t seem to be any significant effect of Mom putting on a mask for 20 minutes in the grocery store; it’s just not enough exposure time. You might expect to see this kind of delay in, say, a very ill child who spends all day in a medical facility, but in that situation there’s obviously a lot going on that’s beyond the scope of the mask question. It’s already been documented that kids don’t make a lot of language gains while hospitalized anyway, so disentangling “language delays from masks” from “language delays from hospitalization” is probably impossible. (Also, good luck telling doctors and nurses to take off their masks in a hospital during a pandemic.) The upshot: “I would not be surprised if there’s research several years from now that shows mild effect in some kids, but to me that doesn’t outweigh the risks of spreading [COVID] more.” She also warns against mixing up correlation and causation when it comes to the timing of developmental milestones–“Don’t fall into that trap.”
-END-
Thought you might like to see this and perhaps respond. Name changed to protect the therapist. Website listed is mine personally; nothing to do with the therapist.