We Are Betraying Our Children

‘W e betrayed our children,” a public-school teacher writes plaintively in a moving and despairing essay published today in Common Sense, Bari Weiss’s essential newsletter-cum-op-ed page. The teacher is correct as far as she goes, but the betrayal is ongoing. We are betraying our children every day, all across this country. To be blunt, we are abusing our children, on a mass scale, in a way we all would have considered unthinkable in 2019.

In “I’m a public school teacher. The kids aren’t alright,” an Ontario pedagogue named Stacey Lance describes the slow-motion decay of the spirits of her young charges as they head into a third year of scientifically uncalled-for, unreasonable, ineffective, and panic-driven restrictions that amount to the creeping sabotage of millions of childhoods, yielding no apparent benefit whatsoever.

If you live in a hard-hit area — and who doesn’t? — you may have noticed that everyone is getting Covid regardless of vaccination, that Covid doesn’t care if you wear a mask, and that this is true even in the most mask-obsessed precincts of our society, such as the New York City public schools, where 100-percent masking has been the norm for this entire school year and where children are discouraged from even socializing at lunch for a few minutes by adults who have spent the entire school year free to spend as many evenings as they please in restaurants among hundreds of unmasked fellow diners chatting noisily.

Along with measurable crises — learning loss and sharp rises in teen suicide and suicide attempts — is a lesser condition of prevailing anxiety. Children’s natural exuberance has been stamped out of them. Extroverted children have become timid and hesitant. Friendships have been severed. Kids are hollow and shrunken. “Overlooked has been the deep shame young people feel,” writes Lance. “Our students were taught to think of their schools as hubs for infection and themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves.”

It’s evident to me that New York City public schools are going to continue to require children to be masked for at least the rest of this school year, by which point the severe disruption in kids’ socialization will have poisoned two and a third years that can never be recovered. There is no sense of urgency about hastening the return to normal life. Masking is the new normal. And what is the obvious result of that? Epidemiologically speaking, not much: The virus simply chuckled and went on with its work. How about socially speaking?

After the schools finally reopened, Lance writes, “It felt like there was no longer life in the building. Maybe it was the masks that made it so no one wanted to engage in lessons, or even talk about how they spent their weekend. But it felt cold and soulless. My students weren’t allowed to gather in the halls or chat between classes. They still aren’t. Sporting events, clubs and graduation were all cancelled. These may sound like small things, but these losses were a huge deal to the students. These are rites of passages that can’t be made up.”

A sort of psychic lethargy has replaced the spark of eagerness in children’s eyes: “In my classroom, the learning loss is noticeable,” Lance continues. “My students can’t concentrate and they aren’t doing the work that I assign to them. They have way less motivation compared to before the pandemic began. Some of my students chose not to come back at all, either because of fear of the virus, or because they are debilitated by social anxiety.” It now seems likely that some significant number of children inclined to shyness will continue wearing masks indefinitely, and as a direct consequence will never develop normal interactive skills. Social media was already nudging kids toward atomization; masking is accelerating the trend.

Yet still, in large parts of the country, there is no movement to stop the insanity. We continue to sustain a mindset of terror in our children’s minds that dwarfs whatever worries kids had in the months after 9/11. I’ve seen firsthand how small children, when they learn they have Covid, may burst into tears and ask, “Am I going to die?”

Terms like “disinformation” and “misinformation” get tossed around too freely these days, but how else would you categorize a sustained campaign to promote needless fear? Flu/pneumonia, guns, motor vehicles, and even heart disease claimed more children than Covid did in the first nine months of last year, and that’s millions of vaccine doses ago. More than five times as many American children died in automobile accidents than of Covid in that period. How polluted would our information ecosystem be if children commonly asked, “Am I going to die?” every time they got into a car? And yet it’s the educational bureaucracy, and the highest echelons of government, that are combining to panic our children.

As David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times, “Omicron is less threatening to a vaccinated person than a normal flu.” Yet teachers in Virginia vow they will not comply with the governor’s executive order to drop mask mandates based on spurious fears that children are especial vectors for the novel coronavirus. Wrong: The virus is everywhere, but children are less likely to spread it than others. And now that even the sainted Anthony Fauci has conceded that “just about everybody” is going to get the virus, why bother with masks that don’t stop the spread because they are “little more than facial decorations” in the first place?

My anger and frustration are not to be mistaken for raw self-interest, unless concern about the future of my children and my country must be defined as self-interest. My credentials in the field of misanthropy are unquestioned, and in order to continue to avoid human contact as much as possible, I’d happily sign a contract agreeing to wear a mask in public for the next five years if doing so would free the children. I’d wear a diving helmet if the kids could go back to normal.

“Watching unmasked politicians yuk it up at a packed Madison Square Garden while millions of kids maintain their indoor distances swaddled in face coverings is just no longer tolerable,” writes Matt Welch in Reason, calling for a “kids’ Liberation Day.” If we have any concern whatsoever for the psychological well-being of our children, we need to have a national bonfire of kids’ masks.