What’s behind the mask? Family, fandoms and playful caring around children’s masks during the Covid-19 pandemic

Recognition of Covid-19 as an airborne, respiratory virus introduced mask wearing suddenly, and potentially disruptively, into many children and young people’s everyday lives in the UK. Guidance, and later regulations, requiring mask wearing for older children in communal spaces, and the uptake in families of masks for younger children despite age-related exemptions, meant that many families swiftly began developing habitual practices around mask wearing. This chapter goes ‘behind the mask’ as a physical, material object representative of the pandemic, and mask wearing as a focal pandemic practice, to explore mask-related practices within extended families. These practices began reframing masks as playful personal items, so seeking to make the strange familiar and even fun, to reassure children during a difficult period and to offer outlets for expressing children’s identities and interests. The chapter draws mainly on auto-ethnographic observations within the authors’ families based in the UK, where public mask-wearing as a means of infection control was not a broad societal norm prior to the pandemic. It considers mask design and the giving and receiving of masks within extended families as an extension of and expression of caring, protective intergenerational relationships. It explores childrens’ own agency in mask design and how children drew on their own fandoms and digital/literary/media interests, such as the Harry Potter, Star Wars and Marvel franchises. It also considers how masks were even presented to children as a gift or treat, drawing on celebratory tradition. It demonstrates how the underlying relationships within families behind these practices address narratives of children as vulnerable and lacking agency during the pandemic.