The Daily Signal - Psychologist Explains Long-Term Effects of Masking on Kids

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

A great deal of psychological development occurs in the early years of a child’s life. So, what happens when that development is interrupted by a global pandemic? How do things such as social distancing and mask wearing affect our children long-term?  “Part of the way that babies stimulate themselves when they are out in the world is by noticing faces,” clinical psychologist Chloe Carmichael says.  In addition to developmental delays, Carmichael says masking and remote learning might have contributed to increased levels of anxiety in children.  Carmichael, who is also the author of “Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Anxiety,” joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss what we know about the long-term effects of COVID-19 protocols on children. She also offers parents some suggestions for how they can help their kids make up for lost development over the past two years.  Also on today’s show, we cover these stories: The Senate passes a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine. President Joe Biden welcomes the leaders of Finland and Sweden to the White House to discuss those countries possibly joining NATO. The man accused of killing 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, is indicted by a grand jury on a first-degree murder charge. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, May 20th. I'm Doug Blair. And I'm Virginia Allen. A great deal of psychological development happens in the early years of a child's life. So what happens when that development is interrupted by a global pandemic? How does social distancing and mask wearing affect childhood development? Clinical psychologist Dr. Chloe Carmichael joins us today to explain some of the potential long-term effects of masking and remote learning.

on children. She also discusses ways parents can correct some of the damages that may have already been done. But before we get to Virginia's conversation with Dr. Chloe Carmichael, let's hit our top news stories of the day. The Senate yesterday passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine. The bill includes just over $20 billion for military aid, including the transfer of advanced weapon systems such as long-ranged artillery. The bill also provides Ukraine with about $8 billion for general economic support and $5 billion in food aid. 86 senators voted to pass the bill with 11 Republicans voting against it based on fiscal concerns.

Senator Mike Braun of Indiana was one of those Republicans, and he told reporters that he does not like the idea that we're footing the bill over there. The Europeans, it's in their own backyard. They're being very stingy now. The bill now heads to President Joe Biden's desk for his signature. President Biden yesterday, welcome the leaders of Finland and Sweden to the White House as both nations seek to join NATO. Speaking from the Rose Garden, Biden said he would be proud for Sweden and Finland to join NATO,

per the New York Post. Today I'm proud to welcome and offer the strong support of the United States for the applications of two great democracies and two close, highly capable partners to join the strongest, most powerful, defensive, in the history of the world. But Finland and Sweden's acceptance into NATO may be unlikely because of Turkey's staunch opposition to the two Nordic countries joining the alliance. All 30 NATO countries must be in agreement to admit new members.

Turkish President Taip Erdogan has accused Finland and Sweden of being homes for terrorists. The Turkish president remarks refer to their refusal to extradite individuals Turkey deems to be terrorists. Diplomats from Finland and Sweden are expected to travel to Turkey for negotiations, despite the Turkish president saying they shouldn't bother. The man accused of killing 10 people and injuring three others at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, has been indicted by a grand jury on a first-degree murder charge. ABC News reported that the suspect briefly appeared yesterday in court

where the judge scheduled his next hearing for June 9th. He's being currently held without bail. Officials are investigating the possibility of adding hate crime and terrorism charges to a sentence. President Biden has begun a trip through Eastern Asia. Today, the president will visit South Korea and meet with the country's new president. Then he will travel to Japan, followed by visits to India and Australia. The trip comes after months of Biden's focus on Ukraine amid Russia's ongoing assault on that nation. Administration officials said the trip is intended to strengthen America's partnership with, with Asian allies and reassure them of America's commitment to guard against China's reach.

China has warned the United States against speaking out on Taiwan's sovereignty during the trip, saying that doing so would put the U.S.-China relationship in serious jeopardy. There are growing concerns that China will launch an invasion of Taiwan. It remains to be seen whether Biden will address the issue publicly on this trip. In an attempt to cut back on so-called disinformation, Twitter, yes, yesterday revealed its new crisis misinformation policy. Twitter announced that it plans to fact-check information in times of crisis, including armed conflict, public health emergencies, and large-scale natural disasters.

The social media company said it will do this via multiple credible, publicly available sources. In a press release announcing the new policy, Twitter head of safety and integrity, Yol Roth said, in times of crisis, misleading information can undermine public trust and cause further harm to already vulnerable communities. Tweets that violate the new policy will not be removed, but instead will require users to click through a warning before viewing the tweet. Additionally, those tweets will have likes, retweets, and shares disabled. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Dr. Chloe Carmichael as we discuss the long-term

effects of masking on children. As conservatives, sometimes it feels like we're constantly on defense against bad ideas. bad philosophy, revisionist history, junk science, and divisive politics. But here's something I've come to understand. When faced with bad ideas, it's not enough to just defend. If we want to save this country, then it's time to go on offense. Conservative principles are ideas that work, individual responsibility, strong local communities, and belief in the American dream.

As a former college professor and current president of the Heritage Foundation, my life's mission is to learn, educate, and take action. My podcast, The Kevin Roberts Show, is my opportunity to share that journey with you. I'll be diving into the critical issues that plague our nation, having deep conversations with high-profile guests, some of whom may surprise you. And I want to ensure freedom for the next generation. Find the Kevin Roberts Show wherever you get your podcast. We are joined today by clinical psychologist Dr. Chloe Carmichael, who's the author of Nervous

Energy, Harness the Power. of your anxiety. Dr. Chloe, thank you so much for being here today. Virginia, thanks for having me. It's really great to be with you, especially to talk about such an important topic. It is such an important topic. And before we really dive in to talking about the effect of masking and social distancing and isolation on kids during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was wondering if you could just take a minute and share a tiny bit of your background and your own qualifications. Sure. So I'm a clinical psychologist, which means I have a PhD in clinical psychology. I have a practice in New York City. I employ other therapists. So I've been practicing, I've had my own practice for about 10 years, and then a PhD takes about six years of training. So I guess in total I've been practicing about 15 years. My book, as you mentioned, nervous energy, harness the power of your anxiety, was in a endorsed by Deepak Chopra, which I was super excited about. And the point of nervous energy,

harness the power of your anxiety is that as a psychologist, I want people to understand that there's actually a healthy function to anxiety because I know that with the pandemic, we've all, you know, had skyrocketing rates of anxiety. And sometimes people have a tendency to just assume that that has to always be bad. But the good news is that Mother Nature gave us anxiety for a reason, which is to stimulate us to do preparation behaviors or to reach out to others or other healthy activities. So that's one of my focuses is to help people learn how to really grow and stay strong and reach their full potential. That's so fascinating. And there's such an obvious need for that right now. So that's wonderful. Now, because today's conversation is largely

talking about kids and, you know, the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on our kids. I was wondering if for those of us who don't have a background in psychology, if you could just take a minute and kind of explain a little bit about how kids' brains develop and just like kind of a quick lesson on childhood development. Sure. So just to really give full credit to the to the true experts, in that area, that would really be what you would call a developmental psychologist, would really be the person that would be a true expert in child development. However, of course, as a clinical psychologist, I'm licensed to work with children, and I have knowledge about children, but it would really be a developmental psychologist. That would be the true expert on that subject. However, just

in some certain information that people would want to know about children, as a, you know, I think especially pertains to the pandemic and, you know, the lockdowns and the masks and how that could be affecting children or how it may have already affected children is to understand that babies like to look at faces. This has been a known fact. You know, whatever perspective you're coming from, whether it be a religious perspective or an evolutionary perspective, it doesn't matter the the reasoning behind it might be different again depending on your perspective but study after study shows that children infants their gaze and psychologists measure this by looking at the child's the infant's eyeballs and where the child is is focusing they will look at the mouths and

the faces of the adults around them and they're doing that because they're getting wired their brain their neurons are starting to wire for language as well as for connection. And what's super interesting is that even in utero, when a baby is in utero in the mom's womb, if you shine a light at mom's womb, the baby will actually track the light with their eyeballs. But here's the really amazing part. If you shine three lights that are shaped like a face, meaning like the two, eyes and the mouth, the baby will track that better than if you have three lights in a random pattern. And evolutionary psychologists speculate that this is, again, just back to that

hardwiring that children have to look at faces because that's where they're getting social cognition information. It's where they're getting language information. It's where they are even learning about trust. Children emotionally regulate by looking at a calm, happy, you know, face. I don't mean to overwhelm you with information, but there's also something called mirror neurons where when we look at the face of another person, our mirror neurons will actually literally make that face. So if mom or teacher or whomever the child is looking at is, you know, giving a warm, encouraging smile or even just a stable, steady, calm expression, the child's mirror neurons are literally picking that up and the child is, you know,

is kind of grabbing and using that to emotionally regulate themselves. So fascinating. So then with something like masking where for the past two years, most babies, toddlers, kids, when they've gone outside of their home into public, they've largely seen adults with half their faces covered and with their mouths covered so they can't read their lips or watch their lips move as they speak, how does that affect kids and babies? There's a million ways I can think of that it could potentially affect them.

The thing is, of course, we don't have a lot of studies on this because prior to COVID, you could never even get university approval to say, hey, I'm going to take a bunch of children and deprive them of human faces on a large scale, you know, for months or years at a time. you know, my first thought is that most university research approval boards would probably say, no, I'm sorry, like that sounds cruel. We're not going to do that study just to see of it affects kids. So I can really only speculate here about how I think that that would affect kids. However, I should also add that although I'm only speculating, we do know, you know, Brown University

recently did a study that showed a significant drop. in the IQs of children that were, you know, going through the first two years of their life during the pandemic. And I think the Brown researchers speculated that that could in part be because of the lack of stimulation. Because again, part of the way that babies stimulate themselves when they are out in the world is by noticing faces. That is, you know, it's just what they are wired to do. As I said, even in utero, they will zero in if you show them anything that is shaped like a face. So they're not only getting language acquisition skills, but they're actually also developing self-esteem. So when you have your baby in the card at the grocery store and everybody starts waving at your baby and saying,

hi, cutie, let me see that smile. That child is not only getting exposed to language, and learning about smiles and how they pair with what psychologists call positive affect. The child is also experiencing their sense of identity and being noticed as a separate person from their mother, right? Because people are interacting with them as an individual. There's also a matter of self-esteem, right? So if the child's supposed to start to make a little frown or, you know, then adults around the child say, oh perk up buttercup what's the matter do you need a change whatever um that baby is again not only

getting exposed to the language and the social patterns and everything else but on a self-esteem level they're internalizing that their community pays attention to them and that they matter right so if you're covering perhaps the child's face or the the faces of the adults around the child their masks so the child can't really notice and register the responses or certain understand the language, right? Like children, like babies don't understand that language. They're really reading the face more than anything at that point. Wow, that's so interesting and so fascinating really just to hear about how we're wired, how we're designed from such a young age to be so aware of faces. Now, speaking of kids that are maybe a little bit older,

school age kids who doing the course of the pandemic, we're working, doing their school work remotely from home for, you know, anywhere between six months to two years on a computer without, you know, extracurricular activities, those sorts of things. What do we know about how that affects a child's mental health? Right. I mean, that's such an interesting question, right? Because even prior to the pandemic, I think it was just basically common knowledge amongst adults that you need to limit your child's screen time, that, you know, increased screen time is associated with, you know, feelings of isolation and, you know, all those other types of things. And so then there we are, like, literally, you know, ordering our children to go sit in front

of a computer, you know, for hours on end. So that in itself, I think, is disruptive. But then also what the child is missing out on again is that social cognition and that self-esteem piece of, you know, say, being in a classroom where all the children, you know, are, our, our, our on the rug together, listening to the teacher, read the story, or, you know, older children, maybe the teacher, the kids are at their desk and the teacher's, you know, talking about how to write down the letter D on the chalkboard or whatever. And the children are able to also notice how their peers are responding to the teacher, right? So they are learning social cognition as well as, you know, focus skills and all of those types of things by being in that group.

And then, you know, if something funny happens, like, you know, maybe, again, I'm talking about young kids, four years old, five years old, you know, suppose one of them like lets out like a little belt or something, you know, and the teacher does like a thing where she goes, oh, my goodness. And, you know, she puts her hand over her mouth and widens her eyes and kind of a playful surprise and says, you know, David, time to say, excuse me. You know, then all of the other children are kind of laughing and the teacher is making light of a moment. But what's also happening there is the children are experiencing the sense of social connectivity and learning empathy and how to behave and how to be comfortable in a group, as well as how to weather minor embarrassments and funny, awkward moments together.

You know, there's just so much that happens through body language and other things that we just simply are deprived. of when we're in front of a computer screen. Fascinating. Now, we mentioned anxiety earlier in our conversation, and we've seen quite a bit of research come out about how anxiety levels have gone up among adults during the pandemic and over the course of the past couple of years. What do we know about anxiety in kids? Did we see an increased level of kids experiencing anxiety over the past two years? Oh, yes, ma'am. My goodness. It's absolutely very high. So the U.S. Surgeon General has recently released a report, you know, showing pretty shocking, you know, levels of increase in that area. So I actually, I wrote a blog with all of like my thoughts about this stuff. It's called maskharms.com, maskharms.com. And there I actually have a link to that Surgeon General's report. You know, and it definitely does show, you know, And now that these rates are skyrocketing.

Now, obviously, it could be due to a lot of things. You know, people could be, you know, the children could be terrified of COVID or, you know, so many other reasons behind it. I'm not saying it's all due to lockdowns and social distancing and masking and having to stay home from school. You know, but I think it could be a big part of it, potentially. One other quick thing, I just wanted to say, Virginia, about being in front of a computer screen versus, you know, being on a playground.

or being in the halls of your junior high school is that those more sophisticated social skills of reading facial expressions matter at that age too. So if you can imagine, say, 12-year-old or 15-year-old children, they're in those little groups at school, little clicks, right? And so if you see a group of girls across the room and they're standing in a circle and they're talking,

you can tell before you're even in earshot, are their mouths moving quickly and animated with happy expressions or are they kind of all with kind of still quiet mouths and one person is speaking and kind of like with their mouth a little bit closed or pursing their lips and you can tell just by looking what kind of conversation is being had and then you you're unconsciously gauging the situation about whether and how to approach And those are sophisticated social skills that kids need to develop. That obviously it's just when you put a mask over everybody's face, I have real concerns about what could happen there. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, for those listening, I want to bring in some solutions because it can be easy to feel really discouraged. Because while things are obviously have begun moving forward in a positive light and the majority of all kids are back in school. and masks are coming off. What has been done has been done for so many kids, and parents want to make sure that there aren't long-term negative effects on their children. So what can we do? Yes. So to your point, Virginia, about, you know, the anxiety factor.

And again, that anxiety is usually stimulating us to do something constructive. So you're right there. It's a perfect example, Virginia, that you're saying, hey, this situation, these concerns are making me a little anxious. What can we do about them? Right? That's the perfect way to go about it. So just like I was saying, I do think that children could be experiencing some of this increase in anxiety and depression due to the isolation that they've experienced from these lockdowns. So I would say that it could be helpful to make concerted, intentional efforts, you know, to get those kids together.

and to help them to get over some of the residual social anxiety that they may now have. For example, a lot of children feel that they, you know, they'll just wear the mask even though they no longer have to. And some of them are doing it because they're just so used to it that showing their face, whether maybe they have, like, as children and teens do, maybe they're missing a tooth, maybe they have crooked teeth, maybe they have a pimple, all those awkward things that, you teenagers normally just kind of get past and grow through socially. Children are now just covering their face, right?

So also, for example, some of them might be wearing the mask because they think it's like, quote, just to be nice, like just in case I could hurt anyone by, you know, my germy self, right? They're holding on to a mindset that maybe, I say maybe was appropriate before we had three vaccines and plenty of treatments and everything else and they're just, you know, so afraid of hurting someone that they're wearing it. And so it can be helpful to, depending on the child, to actually perhaps consider not allowing them to wear it in the same way that if your child told you that they feel comfortable staying in their room playing video games and eating Snickers all day, you might say,

well, honey, you might feel comfortable doing that, but it's not good for you. There's areas that you need to grow and develop. And so I'm going to make that choice for you. You're not going to stay in your room all day and do that. And you might, again, depending on the child and the situation, you might say, you know what, we're definitely doing social time and we're definitely doing it unmasked and you're definitely not bringing a device, you know. So I do think as parents, we have to almost deprogram our kids from some of the effects that this

pandemic and the lackdowns and everything else may have inadvertently put upon our children. Yeah, that's a real shift in thinking. That's really helpful. Thank you. You know, I do think that some people are concerned that when we hit winter and flu season again, that, you know, we'll see what we've seen over the past two years and there'll be, you know, an uptick in cases and that lawmakers might threaten some form of lockdowns again or masking again in schools. How should parents respond to that? Yeah, I think that's a good question. So I think that parents need to be strong and need to be assertive. That's been one of the silver linings of all this is that many parents have had a window into what their children are being exposed to at school in the first place. And they've also discovered

that they need to be their children's advocates or else, you know, the school board, you know, we'll just be making all those decisions for them. So I do think it's important for parents to stand up and to advocate and to really help hold accountable, the people who are making these choices, and to really help them to understand, it's not always just to be safe or out of an abundance of caution. You know, we're going to bring back the masks to say, wait a minute, if we have an abundance of caution, what about our caution for our children's mental and social development? Can we have an abundance of caution about that as well and to educate themselves? You know, there's many ways and places a person could do it. As I mentioned,

I put my own blog at maskharms.com if people want to kind of arm themselves with information, because I'll share with you also, Virginia, that for unfortunate reasons that I don't understand, And many people in my own profession, psychology, really skew towards the, you know, masking and lockdown side, even though they know about these issues. And for example, when I wrote my blog, I sent it to several clinical psychology colleagues of mine, and I asked them for feedback on it. And I got the strangest response. They came back and they said, you know, Chloe, there is nothing like in your blog that

that we disagree with on a factual level, but we think you should take it down because there are moms with guns going to school board meetings and we're afraid that your blog could, you know, spur them on and then they were like, and we've had issues with insurrections in this country. I mean, this, I mean, it felt to me like, to be honest, like crazy talk.

I was like, what are you talking about? There's nothing in my blog that advocates for any form of violence or anything obviously at all. And these are perfectly normally sane, rational people. And people who are normally, again, as psychologists, recognize the value of discussion, recognize the value of debate, and recognize that when you try to silence people, that's when, you know, they're more likely to act out in unhealthy ways. But yet they were trying to tell me that I shouldn't share with people about, you know,

the psychology reasons why these types of lockdowns and things, you know, could be detrimental to children. So I would encourage to your point, like for parents to try to gain the information so that they're not just showing up at the school board meeting and saying, don't bring that mask because I don't like it. I would love if they could be stronger advocates and talk about, you know, social and emotional development or the increase in anxiety and depression and all of these other good reasons why out of an abundance of caution, we may want to avoid masking, you know, depending

on the situation. Yeah, absolutely. And it's something that shouldn't be a political debate. It's in the best interest of our kids. And I think very good point. Yeah, your point to making sure that we're armed with the truth, that we're armed with the facts and the information. So Dr. Chloe, to that, tell us again how we can be following your work, how we can find your book and be tracking with so much of this information that you're putting out. Yeah, thanks, Virginia. So there's two simple URL for people that are interested in more. One I've mentioned is maskharms.com. That masks harm, but just maskharms.com about the potential harms of masks, that mask harms.com. And then the other one about my book about how to use anxiety constructively, the way Mother Nature intended it, you can go to

NervousenergyBook.com. That's Nervousenergybook.com. And also both of those websites will have links to all my social handles. I love to connect on social media too. Great. Yeah, I can attest to the fact that you're very active on Twitter. So again, Dr. Chloe, thank you so much. Dr. Chloe, Carmichael, clinical psychologist, and the author of Nervous Energy, Harness the Power of Your Anxiety. Dr. Chloe, thank you so much for joining us today. We look forward to having you back. Thanks, Virginia. Have a great day. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast on your podcast listening app of choice.

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