What your kindergartner can learn from wearing a mask
As a psychologist and mom of a toddler, I’m excited to finally start school in person after a year of at-home education pods and online classes. Part of me still worries whether I’m making the right choice as COVID-19 cases continue to climb, but I can’t deny that a smile came to my face when I walked my daughter into her classroom and saw her join some classmates in playing with Magna-Tiles. I wasn’t just glad to see my kid having fun. I also know how simple in-person playtime can help foster critical social skills that can’t be learned anywhere else.
However, there was something else in that classroom that made me smile, too — masks with little pictures of Queen
Elsa, Mickey Mouse and other decorations covering the kids’ mouths and noses.
I’ve heard parents express concern that having young kids wear masks may undermine the benefits of in-school socialization. Yes, the subtle facial expressions that comprise so much of human communication are concealed. But in my experience, there’s little reason to think that masks will pose a stumbling block to learning social skills — especially if classmates are playing together outside mask-free during recess. In fact, having kids wear masks actually teaches them an important social skill: how to care for others.
Unless you’re wearing an N95 or some other high-grade model, the real benefit of masking isn’t that it protects you from the virus. Rather, the mask protects everyone else from the virus by limiting your ability to spread it. When we ask kids to wear masks, we send an important message about caring for others. While we might think of our sons and daughters as little angels, the fact that other humans matter isn’t inherent knowledge. Our children need to be taught to care about those around them. They have to learn that the other Houstonians they see in everyday life, from their buddy at the lunch table to the lady who works the checkout line at H-E-B, have lives separate from theirs. And those lives have value.
This is why preschool and kindergarten classes spend so much time on the fundamentals of interpersonal interaction. Share your toys. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Respect your neighbors. Clean up after yourself. These lessons are about more than keeping an orderly classroom — they’re the basic exercises that build the prosocial muscles necessary for interacting productively and peacefully in a larger society.
They’re the lessons that plenty of adults need to remember. Over the past 18 months, I have read far too many depressing stories about moms and dads who treat wearing masks as an unjust burden, or even as a personal insult. This week, I read a horrifying report about a parent at an Austin-area school district ripping the mask from a teacher’s face. Consider that parent in need of a refresher in the kindergarten curriculum.
Maybe, like our kids, the big problem isn’t what we’re learning — but where we’re learning it. For the past year-and-a-half, too much of life has been spent on Zoom meetings, Nextdoor message boards and all the other digital tools that kept us connected but separated during the pandemic. When you spend your time online, instead of interacting in-person, it becomes tempting to see other people as mere two-dimensional figures on a screen. When we have to sit down and work with others in person, whether playing with Magna-Tiles or debating at a school board meeting, those strangers slowly become fully fleshed individuals. Our capacity for empathy and cooperation grows. And wearing a mask starts to feel less like a burden and more like a way to show you respect others and their wellbeing.
The most important skills we learn as kids aren’t necessarily the academic accomplishments marked on report cards, but the early basics that form the foundation of living and thriving in a larger world. And this year, wearing a mask is part of the curriculum.