I'm married to a public (high) school teacher and while I don't have the same level of risk as she does with regards to direct exposure, I get a lot of detail about how kids are reacting to the pandemic. The kids are upset about a lot of stuff. Mask wearing is not one of those things. They're upset about friends and family being infected, they're upset about their parents who work hourly jobs being out of work due to illness. Some smaller number are upset about it being harder to get a 4.0 on all their AP courses.

My point, such as it is, is that there seem to be a lot of people who think that kids are stressed out by disease control measures. My belief is that the kids are stressed out by the disease itself and they're actually pretty happy to try to help in controlling the spread of the disease. Of course not everyone is the same, etc.

My mother is a teacher. Yeah things suck for the kids but kids are more observant than people realize. You could not possibly hide this from them. Globally, millions are dead, and the kids would see that, as well as family members getting sick, no matter what you told them to do or how dangerous you told them it was.

My brother tells his young son this is all an overblown liberal hoax and the vaccine does nothing. Didn't stop the little guy from losing his sense of taste and smell.

These kind of things always sound like people thinking they can hide money trouble from their kids. You basically can't hide stressors from kids. They'll feel it. Hell, you can't hide stressful situations from a damn dog!