ANALYSIS
(LifeSiteNews) — The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has once again come out in favor of the forced masking of young children, claiming that there is “no evidence” that the inability of children to see faces slows language development.
“If caregivers are wearing masks, does that harm kids’ language development? No. There is no evidence of this,” the AAP tweeted in a thread on August 26. “And we know even visually impaired children develop speech and language at the same rate as their peers.”
But the AAP’s own research as well as that of others undermines this claim.
For example, the AAP scrubbed a brochure from its website that explained the importance of babies seeing faces.
University of California-San Francisco epidemiologist Vinay Prasad has also warned about how masking harms children, citing the AAP’s own research.
“Early childhood is a crucial period when humans develop cultural, language, and social skills, including the ability to detect emotion on other people’s faces,” Prasad wrote. “Social interactions with friends, parents, and caregivers are integral to fostering children’s growth and well-being.”
In an essay, he cited information from the AAP that discusses the importance of play and talking for early childhood development.
“Learning activities” cited by the AAP article include “Use your face and voice.”
“Infants love to look at you and hear your voice. In fact, faces, with all their expressions, usually are more interesting than toys,” the document states. “Spend time talking, singing, and laughing. Play games of touching, stroking, and peek-a-boo.”
“Make faces, sounds, and movements that your baby can copy. Then you can copy the things that your baby does. This is how infants learn to communicate,” the article also suggests.
There is evidence from other research that masking delays speech development and evidence that facial cues help people learn language. It is fair to assume that if facial cues help someone learn how to talk, then covering up the face makes it more difficult for someone to learn how to talk.
Yale University’s David Lewkowicz reviewed a series of studies he and others conducted on language development and concluded that “the research to date demonstrates that the visible articulations that babies normally see when others are talking play a key role in their acquisition of communication skills.”
He highlighted this research in a recent essay in Scientific American. For example, one study he published in 2012 “found that infants shifted their attention from the eyes to the mouth between 4 and 8 mo of age regardless of language and then began a shift back to the eyes at 12 mo in response to native but not nonnative speech.”
A 2015 study conducted by Lewkowicz and others concluded that “bilingual infants exploit the greater perceptual salience of redundant audiovisual speech cues at an earlier age and for a longer time than monolingual infants.” Put simply, babies who learn two languages rely on hearing and seeing for language development more than their peers who learn only one language.
Prior to the outbreak of COVID and mask mandates, it was commonsense to encourage children to see faces to learn how to talk.
“Your child learns to pronounce words by watching you speak, but she may become better at forming them by seeing her own mouth move as she talks,” a speech language pathologist said for a 2009 article in Parents magazine about how to get toddlers to talk.
A 2017 document called “Face to Face” from Toronto’s public health department made similar points.
“Being face to face” helps the child “[e]stablish and maintain eye contact, an important part of communication,” the document states. It also helps them “[l]earn to focus on the same thing as you” and “[s]ee how you say different sounds and words.”
Children can also have emotional problems if they cannot see faces. “From infancy, caregiver-child interactions serve as a driving force in developing pragmatic abilities,” University of Colorado pediatrician Dr. Deborah Mood wrote in Pediatrics, the journal of the AAP.
She wrote that parents need to understand how “newborn infants can communicate through behaviors some parents may not be used to thinking of as communication (eg, eye contact, facial expressions, reaching, vocalizations that are not yet words).”
“Once caregivers learn how to recognize these behaviors as an infant’s invitation to engage, they can increase their own efforts to reciprocate and respond to enhance their connection with the infant,” according to the 2020 paper.
LifeSiteNews emailed AAP media reps Lisa Black and Tom McPheron on Wednesday morning with the sources cited above and asked if they challenged the validity of any of the research or could comment on them. No response was received.
See LifeSite’s extensive resources on masks.