School mask exasperation

To a fellow parent:

How does it feel to send your child to school in a mask at this point in time? Where they have to spend the majority of their day, all of their learning and socializing, without seeing faces and forced to keep artificial distance from friends. You may answer “my child really doesn’t mind all that much” you may say “they don’t like it but it is a necessary sacrifice to keep them safe” or you say “they hate it and I hate it but what can I do, it’s a requirement”.

No matter where you fall on this spectrum - and let’s leave aside all issues of evidence for benefit of mask wearing in preventing transmission of this virus or its danger to kids–we have to ask ourselves: how much longer can we do this to them? How much longer should we? When can children have normal lives again (some never got to experience it at all)? Should they mask until the cases fall below a certain mark? Until there is no more Covid? One more month? One more year? Ten? Should masks become permanent in school?

If we don’t ask those questions, how can we determine what we will accept or at what point we should object? What would we have thought in March 2020 if somebody told us that kids would still be forced to wear masks in school in 2022, over a year after vaccines have been made available to all adults and now children?

I know what my answer is and I know what it should have been before I asked myself these questions. Most of all I know what it feels like to see all those children with covered faces and it makes me incredibly sad.Children will put up and go along with almost anything to please parents and adults (abusers know this very well). They will not stand up, rebel or even complain. They need us to do what is right by them. Our job is to protect them and to guard over the limited years that are their childhood. I think that balance is off. Way off. It is inverted. Shamefully children have been made to sacrifice for adults. They have been used as shields when we should be theirs.

I know that every parent weighs the balance of protection and harm very carefully and will choose what they feel is best for their child. In the current time this parental feeling has been manipulated by irresponsible fearmongering by people and agencies that do not have that same motivation and obligation to our children.They cannot answer those questions for us.