For young children, the pandemic comes at a crucial time in the development of important skills for empathy, safety and much more - a stage that some parents are worried about being harmed by wearing masks.

"There are sensitive periods in early childhood development in which language development and emotional development are developing really rapidly for the first years of life," says Ashley Ruba, a researcher at the Wisconsin Children's Emotion Laboratory. Madison.

Being able to use the facial expressions of others or even words, to understand how one feels or to discover (safe, dangerous) aspects of an environment, is a critical task for young children. Concerns that wearing masks may interfere with these natural learning experiences or communication skills have been studied before the pandemic.

When children ages 3 to 8 saw faces covered in masks, they showed no impairment in expression classification, according to a 2012 study published in the journal Cognition. This suggested that children under 9 years old preferred to study the eye area even when they could see full faces, the researchers write.

During the pandemic, Ruba, too, studied whether masks affect children’s ability to understand facial expressions. She and her co-author were shown more than 80 children ages 7 to 13, photographs of redeemed faces, covered in a surgical mask or wearing sunglasses. The faces showed sadness, anger or fear.

When asked to assign one of the six emotions to each face, children gave the correct answer in 66% of cases. Given the innate findings and flexibility of children in adaptation, experts do not doubt any long-term effect that wearing masks can have on children’s development.

"I think once the mask is gone or almost gone, whatever impact it has, we will 'recover' quickly," said dr. Hugh Bases, an associate professor of pediatrics.

If children's social and language development is a little slower, as it could be, balancing it with the risk of someone dying from coronavirus - when all the evidence we have shows they will be fine - it just does not seem to me valuable [not to wear masks], adds Amy Learmonth, professor of psychology.

Source: CNN