After the third day of kindergarten, my son Huxley reported that another kid had kicked him on the playground. It wasn’t a big deal; this kind of thing happens. But on the fourth day, he had a new frustration: He couldn’t figure out who had kicked him. The kid had been wearing a purple mask at the time of the incident, but the next day, no one in Huxley’s class was wearing a purple mask.
With all the things to worry about in 2021, it hadn’t occurred to me to fret about the social impact that masks might have on my son; I’d been so relieved that his public elementary school, in San Francisco, would require them. But here we were. Huxley couldn’t tell his new classmates apart; he had trouble hearing them; he wasn’t sure whether they could hear him; and he became especially disoriented around lunchtime, he said, because that was when all the kids took their masks off. Suddenly they looked like entirely new people. Normally he’s pretty good at making friends, but the confusion was giving him anxiety.
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