Are We Relying Too Much On Our Kid's Resilience?

"'We have inflicted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.' You don’t have to be a psychologist to see something wrong with that exchange. In our focus on one threat, we’ve let a thousand others flourish: learning loss, destabilization of the public-school system due to under-enrollment, self-harm, behavioral problems."

That was just one of the provocative ideas in one of two op-eds from The Atlantic that openly discuss mask mandates in schools and offer a different perspective. Built into this argument are some truths that are hard to dispute. Cloth masks offer little protection. Younger children usually wear masks incorrectly and/or inconsistently. Wearing masks does have an affect how children learn socialization and build empathy. Yet the point that stood out for me most in these articles was this:

Most children are neither in grave danger nor do they pose a grave danger to others, especially now that vaccines are widely, freely available, but we routinely treat them as if they were. The foundation of medical and public-health interventions should be that they work, not that we have insufficient evidence to say whether they are harmful. Continued mandatory masking of children in schools, especially now that most schoolchildren are eligible for vaccination, fails this test.

To be clear, we should all have zero tolerance for violent parents who threaten to bring a loaded gun to school if their child needs to wear a mask, but what if we were more willing to have a discussion about the relative benefits of masking in schools versus requiring vaccinations among children who are eligible? Maybe they are not the same debate, even though they are often treated that way.