During a recent trip taking my 6-year-old granddaughter to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, we and other visitors needed not just reservations but also face masks: all visitors except those younger than 2. Indoors and out. No exceptions.

Everyone was obeying. They weren’t surreptitiously pulling their masks off once they were in darkened passages or feeding the lorikeets. They weren’t slipping their face coverings below their noses.

As we and other families stroked the jellyfish, we smiled at each other with our eyes. Have you noticed that people have gotten much better lately at smiling with their eyes? It warms us to see it. Let’s not lose that when we can unmask for good.

No children were whining about masks despite the heat and humidity of the day. There were no complaints that they couldn’t hear or couldn’t breathe. When the rules were clear, behaving was simply a given.

When we got back to the car, I told my granddaughter she could doff the mask now. “Oh!” she said. “I forgot I was still wearing it.”

I hear stories like this from parents all the time, including those whose kids have been in classrooms with their masks on all day. Even when they slide into the car and their parents remind them that they can take off their masks, they often shrug and leave them on. They’re used to it.

I don’t pretend that personal anecdotes are reality for everyone. And of course families choose to go to the aquarium, while school is compulsory.

But kids have been going to all kinds of places where they wear masks and they’ve been managing. No one should pretend this is normal for the long term. Still, we give kids far too little credit. They’re generally adaptable and able to understand limitations well — at times, it would seem, far better than their parents.

So when Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered mask-wearing inside schools this year — it’s optional outdoors — he wasn’t doing anything California kids can’t handle. Yet the response was lawsuits, because what’s a COVID-19 policy without a lawsuit these days?

But these court challenges reveal more than a lack of knowledge about the delta variant of the coronavirus. They also display a somewhat hysterical attitude, growing more prevalent among parents of privilege in many arenas, that their children are incapable of suffering any discomfort.

The lawsuits include two parent groups and, strange to say, the Orange County Department of Education, which doesn’t actually have authority over most public schools. Maybe it’s the lack of something constructive to do that has led it to embrace conservative causes lately, hosting a forum at which the main agenda seemed to be misrepresenting, then bashing, critical race theory — and then deciding to sue Newsom, challenging his authority to require masks. The state Supreme Court has already rejected that suit.

Children aren’t immune from serious cases, and an infection spreading more easily among them will of course mean a higher number of hospitalizations in the population, including school staff, relatives and neighbors who are particularly vulnerable.

If we’re going to err, let’s err on the side of safeguards that maximize the chance that we can keep schools open. No one is sure what we face here. Luckily, because we have vaccines that hold down the likelihood of serious illness, we’re not in lockdown and we’re no longer emptying our takeout food into home containers. But normal — what we all want to think of as normal — continues to elude us.

There’s a lot to learn from COVID-19. We’re better informed about how scientists go about their job. We all know the word, “comorbidity,” these days, that’s for sure. We learned that “health equity,” once just a phrase to many, actually means life or death for huge numbers of people.

What we need to do next, for kids if not for ourselves, is learn to stop kvetching and fighting every little step.