I want to thank R for her contribution. I reached out to several professionals who are fighting the mask mandate with us. R impressed me because she has all these letters after her name: MA, CCC-SLP.
As some states get set to lift mandatory mask mandates in the public schools, many concerned parents are breathing a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, however, we can still hear the dull drone of specific individuals and entities insisting that this is a bad idea, and many teachers, support staff, and special services personnel continue to support wearing facemasks in school.
I am writing this from the point of view of a speech therapist, who has worked a span of 40 years in just about every therapeutic setting, the longest being in the public schools. As far as speech therapy goes, you would think that wearing facemasks would be counterproductive. We, as speech therapists, want children to look at our mouths, so we can model correct sound placement while providing visual, auditory, and tactile/proprioceptive cues regarding the specific speech sounds we need to correct. Teachers do this too, when they teach phonics or phonemic awareness, or when they perform pre-referral interventions.
Can special needs students be instructed without viewing someone’s mouth? You can try, but its not effective. Hearing-impaired students typically need to watch people’s lips in order to supplement what is picked up by their ears or hearing aids. Same for students with auditory processing problems.
How will they understand masked peers with accents, or masked peers with articulation difficulty? How will second language learners be affected? They need to watch people’s mouths.
What about students who stutter? Will they be more self-conscious about speaking, or will they experience more fear or anxiety when watching masked faces?
What is happening to students with recurring middle ear infections? They are the ones who suffer from fluctuating hearing loss, which, from what I have seen, is worse than permanent hearing loss, because the signal is not consistent.
What about children with voice disorders, specifically, vocal nodules? Wearing a mask may cause them to have to speak louder or with more forceful airflow.
What about the many students that have Asthma? Could they suffer from fatigue, shortness of breath, or difficulty concentrating?
What about the children with articulation problems? Don’t they already have trouble speaking clearly?
Apparently, someone, somewhere, somehow decided that it would be prudent to mandate face masks on a population that is barely impacted by COVID. As of 2/16/22, 307 children 0-4 years and 663 children 5-18 years have died of the virus (CDC, Provisional COVID-19 Deaths: Focus on Ages 0-18). However, of the roughly 73 million US children, about 50,000 under the age of 14 years have died of all causes since the pandemic began (CDC, Oct 2021). Up to 50% of children and young adults have COVID with little to no symptoms (Mayo Clinic). However, their risk of getting severe symptoms the virus increases with obesity, diabetes, asthma, CHD, genetic conditions, and conditions affecting the nervous system or metabolism.
It has been clear from the beginning that healthy children are at little to no risk to COVID harm, and not one health official considered how wearing masks for hours at a time effect these children. Why should healthy children wear them when studies show they may have adaptive immunity to SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 via ACE-2 receptors protecting them from inflammatory effects (see Massalska and Gober, 6/11/21, “How Children are Protected from COVID-19).
Just looking at the field of speech therapy, there are no studies regarding the effectiveness of therapy done by a masked speech clinician. Yet, many clinicians are being mandated to wear them in medical and school settings. Some in private settings have done so on their own accord. Some double mask or they wear a mask and face shield. Some allow students to take off masks in therapy. However, some may not. Others have decided to wear masks with a clear plastic panel that makes their mouths visible. There are reportedly problems associated with all of these, from fogging to dropping down to masks shifting position.
A “new normal” has emerged, but what if the “new normal” is abnormal? A look at some current internet headlines shows that it could possibly be. Examples of headlines I have seen include: “Wearing Masks May Have Disrupted Speech Development, Therapist Says”; “Palm Beach therapist Sees Increase in Children’s Speech Delays During Covid”; “Speech Therapist: 364% Surge in Baby and Toddler Referrals”. At least, people are starting to talk about it.
Importantly, some research on the negative impact of face masks on oral communication is beginning to come out. A research article entitled “The Impact of Face Masks on the Recall of Spoken Sentences”, (Thanh Lan Truong, Sara D. Beck, Andrea Weber), JASA, 1/6/21, found that listeners recalled significantly fewer words when sentences were spoken with a face mask, which they believe suggests that masks increase processing demands, thus impacting the encoding of speech in memory. Another study available in PubMed called “Face Masks Disrupt Holistic Processing and Face Perception in School-Age Children”, (Stajduhar, et. al), 2/7/22, found that not only did facemasks hinder the ability of children to recognize faces by 20% (adults 15%), they also disrupted the typical holistic way that faces are processed. The study’s senior author explains that we use facial information to determine different attributes about a person, including their gender, age, mood, and intentions, and we use this information to navigate thru social interactions. In addition, he states that babies were not designed to see the upper half of the face and infer the lower. Therefore, he raises the question as to what face mask use is doing to infant social, emotional and cognitive development.
I recently read an interesting internet article entitled “Masks Protect Health Yet Obstruct Clear Communication” by Alan Heath (BSC in Psychology), an educational consultant certified in NLP, who is the director of Learning Solutions and Co-Developer of The Movement Program and Test of Auditory and Visual Skills. Although he appears to have faith in face masks protecting health, Heath finds that masks hamper clear communication, and he specifically states that masks negatively affect auditory processing abilities, which many of his clients have. According to him, masks not only block visual information, but they can also negatively affect auditory input, in that higher frequency sounds are reduced or lost and low frequency sounds can actually increase. Therefore, the speech signal may not be reliable, which is already a problem with students having auditory processing difficulties and recurring middle ear infections, or those who struggle to understand what they hear through hearing aids. Heath gives the example of the difficulty hearing the difference between FISH, THIS, and FIST said with a face mask, without the surrounding context being known. But what if phonics or phonemic awareness are being taught? There will be no surrounding context unless the teacher or speech therapist puts it there. Health also brings up the fact that many children with auditory processing problems use lip reading to support their listening ability. He asserts that use of a plastic face shield will cause the voice to hit the shield and be directed backwards, which may be difficult to process, especially for those with sound localization difficulty. Finally, Heath states that since auditory and nonverbal communication combine to help us understand the emotional context of communication, numerous emotions may be lost, and statements may be misinterpreted. This also takes into account the holistic function of communication, with eyes and ears being needed for auditory perception and decoding, whether we are aware of it or not.
I find it particularly appalling that the establishment does not appear to care about what facemasks do to children who have noncommunicable illnesses, disabilities, special needs, Asthma, or those who need to receive special services, and about the quality of these services performed with facemasks. I suggest that parents of children with medical problems get documentation from physicians and to try to get accommodations through the 504 Committee that needs to be in each school.
I hope that I have supplied information that will spark other concerned parents, like myself, to learn about research methods, to dig into the research themselves, to demand that more research be done, or to bring up concerns to be discussed when speaking with school/teacher/CST/speech professionals, for the benefit of children everywhere.
https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/the-more-masks-fail-the-more-we-need?utm_source=url
https://www.justfacts.com/news_face_masks_deadly_falsehoods