1619 Frans Hals, Catharina Hooft with her Nurse (Detail)
CHILDREN can’t always articulate their thoughts and feelings. We can use intuition, common sense, practical knowledge and memories of our own childhoods to understand them. While parents generally have the best of intentions in making their children wear face masks, many people have serious concerns about this practice for the following reasons:
Masks have no proven physical benefits for children themselves. (See CDC mortality figures by age.)
Masks diminish oxygen inhalation, cause wearers to breathe in carbon dioxide and could affect physical development of children.
Masks are uncomfortable and cause children to touch their faces more.
Masks are impractical because they get dirty during play.
Masks lower spatial visibility and could lead to more falls during play and while walking or running.
Masks make it difficult for children to communicate by word and facial expressions.
Masks are frightening, which is why they have often been used in occult rituals.
Masks create general insecurity about the ability of adults to protect.
Masks make it difficult to read the thoughts and intentions of adults.
Masks create an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion, which may affect the psychological development and hopefulness of children.
Masks make it hard for strangers to convey friendliness and good will to children.
Masks are habit-forming and some children will have trouble giving them up.
Masks cause obsessive worry about germs in some children. This paranoia may stay with them for many years.
Masks are ugly and children are sensitive to ugliness, which affects their spiritual development in deep and hidden ways.
Masks endanger childhood innocence by surrounding children with fears of death.
Leaving aside the incalculable, life-sustaining pleasure children’s faces give to adults, especially the frail elderly, as anyone who walks into a nursing home with a baby in her arms will instantly discover, it might be only a slight exaggeration to say that for children, faces are everything. Look at the way a calm baby fixates on the faces around him in a crowd as he looks over the shoulder of the person holding him. He seems to absorb every individual detail of the faces he sees. He does not look at the inanimate things around him. He does not look at clothes or hair. He looks at faces. He has a genius for reflecting on facial personality. What adults may consider an ugly or insignificant face, babies and very young children may find fascinating. They don’t live by the same standards of facial beauty that adults do. It’s individuality that matters to them, which we can know because they hone in on a new face. Babies are often frightened by a new face, but that’s because its individuality is overwhelming and they need time to get to know and trust it.
To tell a mother to wear a face mask while nursing her baby (and to stay six feet away from her newborn as much as possible), as the Centers for Disease Control has done, is a crime against the vulnerable young.
Imagine the little girl in the beautiful 17th-century painting above sitting on the lap of a nursemaid in a mask. Would she be so content and curious? Or would she be fretful and nervous?
Faces are the natural habitat of children, who in some ways live on a much higher spiritual plane than adults. They know the face is the seat of the soul. They are born with this knowledge: Faces are immortal and we cannot thrive or maintain good health without the faces of others. We are human beings, not automatons or biological weapons. Read More »