Masking Children Was Scientifically and Morally Wrong

In many ways, adults and their policy choices failed children during the pandemic. None as obviously as the Center for Disease Control’s guidance on masking, which adopted a policy of masking children ages 2 and up. Childcare facilities, schools, retail establishments, transit systems, and airlines quickly adopted CDC’s guidance. Who can forget the viral video of a family being removed from a plane because their 2-year-old would not keep a mask on? More troubling, this guidance was not based on science, and it represented a choice to prioritize the well-being of adults over the developmental and social needs of children.

The United States’s choice to mask toddlers was both scientifically wrong and morally bankrupt. Globally, CDC’s guidance had the youngest threshold for recommending mask-wearing. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended that children 5 years and under did not need to wear masks. In the United Kingdom, the minimum age for masking was 11 years old. And in Sweden, face masks were never required. As a recent systematic study established, there is no high-quality evidence supporting the effectiveness of child mask mandates, and current scientific data does not support such mandates.[1]

The ineffectiveness of such mandates should have been obvious at the start. For example, under the District of Columbia’s guidelines for masking in a daycare setting, 2-year-olds were required to mask except when eating, drinking, or sleeping. Based on our daycare’s standard schedule of two meals, a snack, and nap period of up to two hours, children over the age of two could spend upwards of three hours per day unmasked. That amount of unmasked time is substantially more than CDC’s guidelines for close contact, which considered “close contacts” as “[b]eing within 6 feet for a cumulative total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period with someone with SARS-CoV-2 infection.”[2] Close contact transmission concerns cannot be reconciled with the unmasked time allowed during the school day.

Masking toddlers was also a moral failing. Pushed heavily by teachers’ unions, universal masking in schools represented a selfish choice for adults’ preferences to supersede children’s developmental, social, and educational needs. Children, particularly young children, rely on observing faces and facial movements to develop language, social cognition, and the neural pathways that underpin empathy.[3]^,[4] The health threat to children posed by Covid-19 is small, and the “infinitesimally small” benefits of masking could never outweigh the potential long-term effects caused by mask mandates.[5] Children’s well-being should not have suffered so that adults could feel subjectively (but not actually) “safer.”

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10894839/.

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/covid/hcp/infection-control/index.html.

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8595128/.

[4] https://www.drchloe.com/blog/psychologists-perspective-on-masks-and-children.

[5] https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/article/mandatory-masking-of-school-children-is-a-bad-idea/.

April 18, 2025