In addition to being an ECE Director/Owner, I spent over 25 years working as a Speech Language Pathologist in multiple settings with both children and adults. One of the advantages our center has, is that although I am the director, I am also on hand to screen for speech and language development disorders with all of our students. When we reopened our center 3 weeks ago, after being closed for 3 weeks, it was quite an adjustment for all of us, to have to try to implement all of the new CDC safety protocols. The one new protocol that has been the hardest for the children and the staff to adjust to is that the Staff are required to wear mask while in the building or classrooms. Although the 3 years old and older students have done better with change, I have noticed that the quality and clarity of the teachers speech is significantly reduced while wearing the mask. It is a much more muted and muffled sound.
After noticing that, I started to wonder what would be the possible impact of the speech and language development of our infant and toddlers. Sure enough, the sound quality issues were the same in both of those classrooms. The way children learn speech, language, intonation and various inflection patterns is through site and sound. Babies will intently look at a caregivers face while the caregiver is speaking to them. If their head is turned away when they hear their name or a sound, they will start to look around to discover wear the sound came from. In addition the infants look at the caregivers eyes, lip and cheeks that give clues about whether the care giver is happy, sad, angry or mad. You will often see an infant or even a toddler try to move their lips around imitating what the care giver's lips are doing while speaking. They may also try to reach outwith their hands to touch the lips or face while the caregiver is speaking. All of these different elements of speech, language, hearing and social language recognition, can only be developed by the young child being able to fully visibility interact with the caregiver.
However, when a caregiver is wearing a mask, all of those speech and language clues disappear or they are diminished. It is just one of the many unintended consequences of the new Safety protocols. We obviously want to keep our staff and the children safe, but we must recognize that the trade offs for safety could cause significant delays in speech and language development,especially among young children.
I don't have any answers to this deli ma yet, but for those of you that have adapted the masks as part of your protocols, I wanted to share my observations with you, so that we could collectively start thinking about some possible solutions.
Looking forward to your thoughts and comments.
Tim Kaminski, M.S. CCC/SLP
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Tim Kaminski
Director/Owner
Gingerbread Kids Academy
Richmond TX
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