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My son started grade three a few weeks ago. Alongside the usual challenges of moving up a grade, this has meant another transition: he’s now old enough to have to wear a mask indoors at school.
It’s a pain in the neck for us parents, having to make sure he has a clean mask every day, and that he remembers to take it and doesn’t lose it on the way to school. For my son and his friends, though, it seems like it’s only a minor inconvenience (maybe not so minor on hot days).
Masks to stay for some primary school children.Credit:Getty
Even after two years of the pandemic, it still looks a bit weird to me to see small children with their faces covered. But kids adapt much quicker.
He accepts it as part of the “new normal”, or “living with the virus”, or whatever we’re calling this strange period that is not quite post-COVID no matter how much anybody wishes it were. It’s like the RATs he and his prep-aged sister do in the morning twice a week, sitting at the kitchen bench: not much fun, but worth it.
As mask rules for adults are easing up, I can understand the argument that it’s only fair to relax them for children as well.
But to me there are two reasons to keep them (at least for now). First, only half of primary school kids have had even one shot of vaccine. When a solid majority of kids are fully dosed, it will be a different story.
And second, we need to do everything we can to keep schools open this year. I can’t emphasise this bit enough.
The past two years of homeschooling made the value of in-person education and socialisation very clear (for children and parents). If cases start skyrocketing in classrooms, it could all be over again.
Masks are inconvenient. But to me they seem like one of the smaller irritations caused by a global pandemic that knocked the world off its axis for two years.
When I worry about the long-term effects of the pandemic on my kids, I worry about the isolation, the living via screens, the missing out on learning and other formative experiences. I don’t worry much about trauma from wearing a piece of cloth over their faces.
So, if masks help kids get back quicker to the kind of lives that were put on pause in 2020, I think they’re worth keeping.
A few weeks in, the school’s COVID measures (including masks) seem to be working: a case or two a day, little if any spread in the classroom. And that means my kids can get on with the business of being kids.
Michael Lucy is a Melbourne journalist.
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