What Kind of Mask Should My Kid Wear?
When I initially wrote a piece on the best face masks for kids, it was the summer of 2020. Mask-wearing was common among adults, but I think many children (and their parents) had yet to grapple with the importance of mask-wearing for children. As the months of this interminable pandemic dragged on, the necessity of mask-wearing—particularly if your kids, like mine, were attending in-person school—became increasingly apparent. And then the vaccine happened, and rates went way down, and then…well, you’ve heard of Delta, and know how this story goes.
So I find myself, again, in the summer of 2021, wondering about masks for kids. Do they need new ones? The equivalent of a back-to-school outfit for the fall? We know a lot more now than we knew back then about how the virus affects children, and much of it is good. Most children who get Covid-19 have no symptoms, and instances of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C)—a possible Covid complication—are rare. As the pediatric ENT specialist Jaqueline Jones put it to me, “the risk of Covid-19 to children, even the Delta variant, is much less than it is to adults. It is thought that children have strong immune systems and can fight off the virus. Our recent study of asymptomatic children who underwent routine testing for Covid-19 showed a rate of less than .5%.”
And yet, we don’t want to dismiss the tools we do have to prevent infection, especially since the use of the Covid-19 vaccine is not yet approved for children under 12. While children may not themselves get sick, they can still pass on the infection to unvaccinated adults in their lives, with catastrophic consequences, as we are not all too well aware. “One thing we saw in L.A. during the winter surge,” pediatrician Harvey Karp tells me, “is parents being hospitalized, but not the children. Imagine that situation, with no one to take care of your child.“
The CDC recently urged mask-wearing indoors, even for vaccinated adults, a recommendation that had immediate repercussions on the flashpoint issue of whether to require masks in schools, with different governors taking different positions on a potential mandate. “This is not a state-by-state disease,” Karp says when I ask him about a federal mask mandate in schools. “There are no borders between states when it comes to disease.” He also points out that the number one thing we can do to protect adults and kids is to get more people vaccinated: “We’ve got to stop taking advantage of the doctors and nurses and healthcare professionals who are exposing themselves to people who are getting sick because they are not getting the vaccine.”
But until the vaccine is approved for use in younger children, masks remain one of the simplest and best ways to protect your children and the people they come in contact with—and they should be a tool that assuage any fears parents might have about sending their children back to school after what might have been a year or more of remote learning. “Do not displace your anxiety over returning to school onto your children,” says Jones. “In-person education is vital to their growth and development.”
Below, our edit of the best face masks for kids.
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