Masking toddlers shows Beshear administration lacks common sense

Jennifer Washburn, owner of iKids Childhood Enrichment Center in Benton, KY, testified before the Interim Joint Committee on Health, Welfare & Family Services this week about which COVID prevention strategies are — and are not — working in her facility. Chiefly not working is masking 2- and 3-year-olds.

Gov. Andy Beshear’s most recent face mask executive order applies to any person 2 years of age and older who doesn’t meet any mandate exemptions and Washburn’s staff struggles daily with what she calls “mask teaching” and what she compares to “trying to keep a mask on a cat."

According to Washburn, “On any given day, you have 2-year-olds throwing their masks in the trash, or on the floor, or chewing on their mask, or picking up another child’s mask and chewing on that mask. Teachers are constantly reminding children ‘mask on face, mask on face; where’s your mask; mask on face.’”

Washburn also points out that children ages 24-36 months don’t have the fine motor skills to put on or fix their masks without proper assistance from an adult. So, as the children continually remove their masks, the child care givers are tasked with placing them back on each child’s face and they must sanitize their hands between helping each child. Continually. All. Day. Long. With days like this, it’s no wonder that Washburn reports staff shortages.

Washburn also pointed out that toddlers are at the prime age for language development and there are no long-term studies on the effects of the speech development of children being masked that young.

Masks also block the visual field of children trying to play with toys, “resulting in taking off their masks, resulting in the teacher saying ‘mask on face,’ resulting in the teacher putting the mask back on face and then washing their hands yet again,” she said.

One of the children in Washburn’s center was diagnosed with a speech delay, but the mother of the child was told by her pediatrician that the only way the child could be exempt from mask-wearing is if she were diagnosed on the autism spectrum. This illustrates one of the many reasons that parents should be making the decision about whether or not to mask their children.

If the Beshear administration had applied common sense to the mask mandate, talked to any caregivers of toddlers or any mothers of children that age, they would know that 2- and 3-year-old children aren’t developmentally able to mask properly. Instead, they’ve added a significant source of stress onto teachers of toddlers and are hindering the children’s chance to learn much of anything else other than perhaps masking.