Speech Therapy Shows the Difficult Tradeoffs of Wearing Masks
Americans have been arguing about pandemic restrictions for two years, and the debate is particularly fraught among parents of small children, for good reasons. While measures such as masking and isolation mean temporary discomfort or inconvenience for most people, their consequences for still-developing young children are more mysterious, and possibly more significant and lasting.
Children with speech or language disorders offer perhaps the clearest example of these murky trade-offs. Pandemic restrictions vary by state, county, and school district, but I spoke with parents in California, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, New Jersey, Iowa, and Maryland who said their children’s speech therapy has been disrupted—first by the loss of in-person therapy and then by masking requirements, in places that have them.
[Read: Parents are losing their minds over masks in schools]
Megan’s son, for example, has , a rare genetic and , each the hard-won victory of intensive speech therapy he’d received since he was 2. But he regressed a lot during remote therapy, and is still struggling now that therapy is in person, because his therapist wears a face mask. (Megan, who lives in California, asked to be identified by her first name only in order to protect her son’s privacy).
