This year’s must-have back-to-school item: Masks

Fall is drawing near, and right on schedule, ads offering discounts on backpacks, notebooks and pencils are beginning to pop up on television and online.

But this year, amid a pandemic that has school officials agonizing over how and whether to safely reopen, masks are appearing among the glue sticks and glitter as essential back-to-school items.

Companies like Crayola, Old Navy and Disney have begun selling colorful masks for children in packs of four and five as part of their back-to-school offerings. Even larger quantities of masks for children — up to 50, in some cases — can be found on Amazon; while Etsy, the e-commerce site for handmade items, has a large selection of face shields adorned with cartoons and animals.

It’s all very bright and colourful, if a little dystopian.

Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at the Cohen Children’s Medical Center in Queens, said face masks for children should be viewed positively.

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“The reality is, you want children to go back to school in the safest way possible,” he said. “Having child-friendly face masks in terms of fit and appeal are probably more part of the solution than the problem.”

With the school year quickly approaching, schools across the United States are grappling with how to reopen — and whether they can reopen safely at all. In most districts where students will be allowed to return to the classroom, they’ll do so with a requirement to wear masks or face coverings, although that directive is not universal.

There are concerns that the reopening of schools could spark outbreaks, especially among older children. A large study from South Korea found that children younger than 10 transmit the coronavirus much less often than adults, although the risk is not zero. Children between 10 and 19 can spread the virus at least as efficiently as adults do, the study found.

Another study, published in JAMA Pediatrics last week, , complicated the picture, saying that infected children have at least as much of the coronavirus in their noses and throats as infected adults and that children younger than 5 may host up to 100 times as much of the virus in the upper respiratory tract as adults.

The research does not necessarily prove that children are spreading the virus, but experts said the findings should influence the debate over whether and how to reopen schools.

Although scientists and health authorities said that masks reduce the spread of the coronavirus, even adults can’t agree on wearing them. Even as more than half the states have issued mask requirements in recent weeks, there remains resistance from some people, including some conservatives and Republican leaders who cast the requirements as a threat to personal liberty.

Many children have been wearing masks since the spring, when the U.S. outbreak was intensifying, but usually at their parents’ direction. Now, as they prepare to return to the classroom, they will be beyond their families’ control but may be required to wear masks at school.

In terms of fit and acceptance, it’s important that masks be designed for children, Adesman said. Masks, he said, are a “tangible reminder” that life right now is different from before the pandemic, but they are also “one important step toward trying to approach some semblance of normalcy.”

Shannon Dorsey, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, said the key to getting children to wear masks in school was to make them fun.

“As a clinical psychologist and as a parent, we know our children are more likely to wear masks if they think they’re a fun print that they like, if they’re engaging,” she said.

Rich Wuerthele, Crayola’s president and chief executive, said the company had designed its masks to help children adapt to the new normal and feel comfortable in school. The masks are being marketed to parents, rather than their children, he said, and are “meant to continue Crayola’s corporate mission to let kids colorfully express themselves and to support a smooth transition back to school” for those who are returning to the classroom.

Sandy Goldberg, a spokeswoman for Gap Inc., which owns Old Navy and several other brands, said the company had started making face coverings for families at the outset of the pandemic.

“This is about meeting a customer need and providing a necessary item for the whole family,” Goldberg said in a statement, adding that the company hoped the child-oriented patterns would encourage children to feel comfortable and excited to wear their masks when needed.

The back-to-school period is usually a flush time for businesses, and surveys about spending this year are mixed. Deloitte, the accounting firm, predicted that sales would reach $28.1 billion this year, up slightly from $27.8 billion in 2019. The National Retail Federation’s 2020 survey suggested that back-to-school spending could reach $33.9 billion, up from $26.2 billion in 2019. It said it anticipated an increase because many families are preparing for an extension of remote learning by purchasing laptops and other electronics.

Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at GlobalData, said he had seen stores put a greater emphasis on protective products — like hand sanitizer, masks and wipes — as necessary back-to-school items. While stores aren’t aggressively pushing those items, he said, they are taking advantage of the need for them.

To some degree, Saunders said, some stores want children to pester their parents for masks, “for kids to say, ‘I want that mask because it’s nicely designed,’ or, ‘I like the patterns and colors on it.’”

He added, “There’s definitely a target for kids on these products.”

Saunders said that while retailers were making money off the growing need for protective items, they would lose money elsewhere — for instance, on clothing sales — if children are studying remotely this fall.

Dorsey of the University of Washington, who has a 6-year-old son, said there were ways to encourage children to wear masks without scaring them. If that is done with the proper care, she said, children could come to see masks as commonplace much as an earlier generation of children came to accept the widespread use of bicycle helmets.

“If there are masks available that people can buy and we’re not preying on people with anxiety and fear, but just a product that we can purchase, given that children will have to wear masks,” she said, “then to me it doesn’t seem to be a horrible thing.”