Dreyfuss writes that her son “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.” The normally affable boy developed anxiety from all of that confusion. And how could we expect anything else of a child deprived of essential facial cues while learning to be human?
It was a rude awakening for Dreyfuss. “With all the things to worry about in 2021,” she wrote, “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,” natch, “would require them.”
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