By this time next week, mask mandates will be done in all of the major school districts in our area. School boards and administrators have decided that case numbers that led them to go to fully-virtual learning two years ago–and to keep masks on students and staff for a second school year–are now acceptable to go without requiring face coverings. But this Two Cents is not about the inconsistency of reacting to data and how emotion and politics have driven school mitigation policies from day one. Instead, this Two Cents is about how to un-scare the children.
Scaring kids is a common tactic to gain their compliance with what adults want them to do. Fear is the most basic of emotions and the most powerful when it comes to directing behavior. We tell kids not to get close to the stove or they will burn themselves. We tell them that if the ride their bikes in the road they will get hit by car. We tell kids that if they jump on the bed they will fall off and break their arms. We even tell them that if they misbehave Santa won’t bring them any presents for Christmas.
For two years now we have told children that a very dangerous invisible monster is living among us. And the best way to avoid the monster is to wear a mask over your mouth and nose. And if you don’t wear your mask the invisible monster might get you! Or it might get your teacher! Or it might get someone you love! “You don’t want Grandma and Grandpa to get really sick do you, honey? So make sure you keep that mask on all day! (Except when you are sitting in the cafeteria eating with a couple dozen other kids).”
But next week, that no longer become the message we are giving school children–and some (especially younger kids) are going to be confused. There was a video that went viral on social media last week of a classroom of grade schoolers being told that they would no longer have to mask up in class and they all went into wild celebrations–but not every child is going to react that way. Some students who have been told so many times for so long that “you wear your mask to protect me, and I wear my mask to protect you” will wonder why so few of their peers and teachers no longer want to “protect them”.
They know that coronavirus hasn’t completely gone away. The bottles of hand sanitizer and the plexiglass dividers and the signs encouraging everyone to wash their hands ten times a day will all still be around them. If they ride the bus, they will still be required to mask up, because a different group of adults make the rules on the bus–and they don’t think it’s safe to be inside around other people yet.
And then you have the parents who have been operating at DefCon 1 since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the US. They were the ones demanding virtual learning options for their child even into this school year. They were early adopters of N-95 masks when everyone else was wearing Star Wars and Hello Kitty cloth masks. They were the first in line when vaccines became available for kids their age. Those parents will continue to try and scare their children. And they will make every attempt to shame the parents that decide they are done scaring their kids–coming to school board meeting to complain that their child was “bullied for wearing a mask”. In arguing against lifting mask mandates, this was the main concern raised by school board members in meetings that I covered–teasing and peer pressure–not the actual risks posed to kids that go without masks in the classroom.
So this promises to be a very uncomfortable weekend for some parents–as they try to undo the psychological damage done by two years of scaring their kids for reasons that have yet to be borne out by data and science. Maybe they will want to call their Baby Boomer parents to find out how they got over the scars of having to huddle under their desks to “protect” them from Soviet nuclear attacks.
