The wearing of face masks during the pandemic has caused a 364% increase in patient referrals of babies and toddlers according to speech therapist Jaclyn Theek.
During an intervoew with WPBF News, Theek said that before the pandemic, only 5 per cent of patients at her clinic were babies and toddlers, but now this number has soared to 20 per cent.
Summit News reports: Parents are describing their children’s speech problems as “COVID delayed,” with face coverings the primary cause of their speaking skills being seriously impaired.
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As young as 8 months old, babies start learning how to speak by reading lips, a thankless task if parents and carers smother themselves with masks to comply with mandates.
“It’s very important kids do see your face to learn, so they’re watching your mouth,” said Theek.The news report featured one such mother, Briana Gay, who is raising five children but having speech problems with her youngest.
“It definitely makes a difference when the world you’re growing up in you can’t interact with people and their face, that’s super important to babies,” said Gay.
According to Theek, since the pandemic, autism symptoms are also skyrocketing.
“They’re not making any word attempts and not communicating at all with their family,” she said.
As we previously highlighted, Forbes deleted an article written by an education expert who asserted that forcing schoolchildren to wear face masks was causing psychological trauma.
A study by researchers at Brown University found that mean IQ scores of young children born during the pandemic have tumbled by as much as 22 points while verbal, motor and cognitive performance have all suffered as a result of lockdown.
Michael Curzon noted that two of the primary causes for this are face masks and children being atomized as a result of being kept away from other children.
“Children born over the past year of lockdowns – at a time when the Government has prevented babies from seeing elderly relatives and other extended family members, from socialising at parks or with the children of their parent’s friends, and from studying the expressions on the faces behind the masks of locals in indoor public spaces – have significantly reduced verbal, motor and overall cognitive performance compared to children born before, according to a new U.S. study. Tests on early learning, verbal development and non-verbal development all produced results that were far behind those from the years preceding the lockdowns,” he wrote.
