[generalk]

  > Blocking the faces of children in the prime of their 
  > life, where they need to develop social skills through 
  > interaction and facial expression, is madness.

[Citation needed.] I am unable to find a single reliable source that says mask wearing has any sociological or psychological effect on children or anyone else. Anecdotally, I haven't seen anything like that. Just typical kids.

  > The covid risk for children is a rounding error.

Again, who says that's true? Can't find it. The Ohio Department of Health maintains a dashboard[1] for this, which indicates that it's significant enough to track, and the numbers there sure aren't "rounding error" numbers.

Assuming what you meant is "children are less likely to develop severe symptoms," and also that that's true: they can still spread the virus to the adults they live with in their homes, or the many adults that share the school building they're in. (Did you think we just shove kids in an adult-less environment, or that teachers are somehow immune?)

[1]: https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/dashboa...

[PKop]

You're only saying that you don't care about the detrimental effects of masking children or disrupting normal education processes, because adults will have some minor unspecified improvement on their rate of catching covid. Ok.

I disagree that it's worth harming kids development to attempt to avoid spreading a coronavirus that is becoming endemic, will always be around, and whose spread can't be stopped. Not worth it.

Ohio total covid deaths: 24,763

Ohio total 18 and under covid deaths: 12

Ohio total 18 and under population (2019): 2,578,019

If this isn't a rounding error, what is?

[busymom0]

> I am unable to find a single reliable source that says mask wearing has any sociological or psychological effect on children or anyone else.

You are looking for the wrong thing. Look for what the benefits of things like smiling and seeing smiling faces has on people's emotional health.

> A happy face signals positive emotions, as well as attachment availability, care, support, and credibility [7,8,9]. Recently, Tamir and Hughes [10] argued that positive social signals such as smiling faces not only serve ultimate goals (e.g., forming strong bonds) but they are also rewarding in and off themselves.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6356968/

https://www.healthline.com/health/baby/when-will-my-baby-smi...

Hiding the main part of your face - the smile is not healthy for people, and especially not for kids whose entire social skills development heavily relies on these things.