The continued negligence, and irresponsibilty, of parents and teachers in Taiwan allowing young people to hide behind their mask is creating a generation of children with extremely low-esteem and poor social skills. It’s so sad and would be totally avoidable if the adults in these kids lives started adulting and insisted on them removing them.
I’m a career teacher (25 years) and a parent of teenagers.
When asking my students “Why are you still wearing a mask?” I consistently get the same answer:
Well, plenty of kids had self esteem and poor social skills issues before masking, so it seems self evident that these issues would not be “totally avoidable if the adults in these kids lives started adulting and insisted on them removing them.” What makes you come to the conclusion that these issues are totally avoidable by insisting on removing masks?
Indeed, and herein you have an opportunity to help in that regard by responding with something like, “I am sorry if it seems that way, but you are definitely not ugly. When you are older you will realize that everyone is different, and there will always be people who see ugliness and there will always be people who see beauty, but if you prefer to wear a mask right now that is okay.”
Whenever I ask doctors why they still wear masks when seeing patients and performing surgery I get the same answer: so the patients won’t be able to positively id them if something goes wrong.
Look many of us are in the teaching profession here in Taiwan.
There are masks. There is depression. Therefore masks are causing depression.
If my students write stuff like that I circle it and send it back.
Instead of mixing up correlation with causality, the poster could step back and see longer trends that have already been identified by other posters. On my side, I am damn well aware of the suicide rates and what is going on in the past decade. And this deeply unhappy trend did not start with masking in early 2020.
OP has claimed to be a teacher and parent too. Maybe “creating a generation of…” is a bit excessive, but their point with the bit you quoted appears to be that they consider it negligent and irresponsible of parents and teachers to still be encouraging/requiring mask use.
I’m not a teacher or parent and don’t otherwise hang out with Taiwanese kids, but is it perhaps the case that your fondness for masks, or more broadly for governments acting like they’re doing something, is preventing you from considering they might also cause harm, in addition to whatever they’re doing or not doing against COVID? (I’m sure I asked you something very similar around 9-10 months ago to no response. I remember the time period because I was writing it while at the Thai DVLA renewing my motorbike license.)
I’m not sure of the scale of the harm, but it’s not hard to imagine that not being properly exposed to facial cues during key stages of childhood development might have negative consequences on learning to interact with other humans.
Do you doubt that? Or is the potential harm just worth it if it might do something to reduce the risk of them getting what in the vast majority of cases is little more than a cold?
Then drop the condescending attitude and let’s talk about the subject I brought up: Parents and teachers allowing kids to continue to hide behind their masks is harmful to students. Whether creating or amplifying low self-esteem is irrelevant IMHO (though personally I feel it’s amplifying it), the point is kids don’t experience shared joy as much as unmasked kids, are being encouraged to be more shy and less socially accountable, and are being robbed of opportunities to build confidence and healthy self esteem with especially with regards to their own bodies and looks.
Because over the past 25 years, I’ve never seen the majority of young people I’m around proclaim to publicly hide their face because “I’m ugly”. I teach a wide cross-section of people from 5 to adults and have been hearing this answer since November when we were allowed to take off our masks and almost nobody did. Removing masks and getting on with life is normal. Everyone in the world has done it, time for Taiwan too. I’ve been to 8 countries in the past 6 months (in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America) and almost nobody wears a mask except in Taiwan. I believe we’ll really see the negative impact of this as these kids reach young adulthood. I also believe this is preventable if parents and teachers simply said " Are you sick? No? Take off the mask."
