A video of a one-year-old walking up to random objects, pressing on them and rubbing her hands together as she walks away went viral earlier this year. A toddler who thinks everything is a hand sanitizing station, though funny and super cute, begs the question: how are children growing up in the time of COVID-19 being affected?
Wearing masks is a public health measure that has spanned the globe for a year now, and while they can be annoying and awkward for adults, masks have also presented a unique set of challenges for children.
“That first year of life is when speech and language are emerging in a major major way,” said David Lewkowicz, senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories and a professor adjunct at the Yale Child Study Center.
Lewkowicz has been researching the importance of visual speech information, or lipreading, in children and babies since long before the pandemic. He co-authored a 2012 study that showed babies a short video of a woman talking, and used an eye-tracking device to capture where on the woman’s face the babies focused their gaze.
“What we discovered, in a nutshell, was that at four months of age babies were really interested in the eyes of the talker. But then at eight months of age there was a really dramatic shift … where they started to look much more at the mouth region of the person that was talking to them.”
A 2012 study that tracked the eye movements of infants found that they pay the most attention to the eyes of a speaker during the first few months of life, as seen on the left in research on a child at four months of age. But by around eight months of age (right), their attention shifts more to the person’s mouth as their speech develops. (David Lewkowicz/Haskins Labs/Yale University)
As they grow, babies use lipreading as part of speech and language development. This means that for infants who are in daycare settings, and therefore constantly seeing masked caregivers, “there may be some detrimental effects of at least extended exposure [to masks],” Lewkowicz said.
When people around infants in bilingual households wear masks it could present an even greater impairment, he said, because these children rely even more on lipreading to differentiate the phonetic sounds between the languages.
But parents and guardians, fear not. The advice for combating the potential effects of masks on speech development is relatively simple: increase face-to-face time with your baby at home.
“Simply just take them in your arms, pick them up, have them in front of you and interact with them as much as you can en-face. So they really get that full package — the auditory and visual package,” Lewkowicz said.
Julie Amoroso holds her seven-month-old son Isaiah. Researchers say the first year of a child’s life is a crucial period for speech and language development. (Jared Thomas/CBC)
Emotional barriers
Reading lips is obviously harder these days, but so is reading emotions. And for children who are still developing their interpersonal skills, masks can pose a challenge in that area as well.
It’s a challenge accepted by John Gelntis, a kindergarten teacher at King Edward Junior and Senior Public School in Toronto. He says now that his students are back to in-class learning and wearing masks all day, it’s more important than ever they learn to express their emotions clearly.
“It is harder, because they can’t get the full range of the emotions. But we try and do a lot of self-regulation activities where they can kind of navigate those things and see, ‘OK, how are you feeling today,’ right? Like, how can you check in?”
He’s also teaching them how to read the emotions of their masked peers.
“We always try and model empathy and how to care for one another. Now it’s just finding different ways of doing it … listen to the tone of my voice, look at my body … look at my eyes and my eyes crinkling at the sides, that means I’m smiling, I’m happy. My eyes are bugging out of my head probably means I’m scared,” Gelntis said.
Kindergarten teacher John Gelntis is helping his students overcome the challenges of mask wearing by encouraging them to express their emotions clearly. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Kang Lee, a developmental neuroscientist at University of Toronto, says emphasizing emotions is also good practice for adults interacting with children while masked.
“The type of words, that’s one. But also the sound that goes with the words. So you emphasize some of the emotions through words … I’m using my gestures, I use my posture. So I would suggest teachers try to accentuate this kind of information to compensate for the lack of facial expression,” he said.
Recognizing faces
Masks hide not only our emotions, but also our identity at times. The adult ability to recognize a face is reduced by about 15 per cent if the person has a mask covering their nose and mouth, according to a York University study published in December.
But kids may be having an even harder time, according to a second study from the same research team that is currently under review. It indicates school-aged children between six and 14 years old have their face-recognition abilities impaired by about 20 per cent when a mask is present.
To help children manage, masked adults should “wear something that is very personalized … for example, you wear a mask with the flower here and there to represent you as a teacher,” Lee said. “Don’t change your hairstyle. Don’t change your glasses. You know, these are the things that kids latch on to recognize you.”
This strategy seems to be working on the schoolyard in Toronto. When the kindergarteners were asked how they recognize their teacher in a mask, five-year-old Maisie said: “I know that’s Mr. G, because he has a turtle mask and that turtle is looking at me!”
As for how the kindergarteners recognize their friends, Matilde, also five, said: “By their clothes and their voice.”
Kindergarteners told CBC News that with everyone wearing masks, they tend to recognize friends more by their clothing and voices than by their faces at the moment. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
These are good strategies for the day to day, but Lewkowicz said there’s potential for long-term impacts of mask wearing on face-perception development.
To determine who they are looking at, adult brains perceive the face holistically, meaning they compute the distances between the features all at once and see the face as a singular object. Children are just developing these skills, and the masks could disrupt that development.
“There’s general agreement now that somewhere between four to five years of age is where the ability to start to perceive faces as holistic objects begins to emerge …. Now, if you imagine that those kids are now living in a world where half the face is blocked, that is clearly going to have an effect on the development of this ability, which is really really important for face recognition,” Lewkowicz said.
The good news is kids are very adaptable, and Lee said one theory is that they may come out of the pandemic with heightened perception abilities in other areas compared to what they would have had otherwise.
“What we have learned in the past is when something like this happens, that you block some kind of information channel and kids have to navigate around it, suddenly their other kind of abilities increase, not decrease, because the child’s brain is very plastic and very adaptive.”
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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
