Pigpen Grew Up To Be Healthy!

I don't remember the context, but recently I was inspired to recite one of my favorite stories. This happened when I was living with my sister in Ann Arbor. We went out to Mongolian BBQ, and while we were waiting in line to cook our food, we were next to a table where there were what looked like two couples, one of whom had a small (~14-18 month old) child in a booster seat with a tray in front of him.

The boy was sucking on a pacifier, which fell out of his mouth onto the tray of his booster seat. His mother reached into the diaper bag and took out a small tupperware container and an alcohol wipe, one of those things you use to clean your hands after you eat ribs. She tore open the alcohol wipe, took it out, opened up the tupperware, wiped off the inside of it. Then she picked up the pacifier, wiped it off with the wipe, put it in the tupperware, sealed it up, and returned everything to the diaper bag.

At the time, my nephew was about 3 and was absolutely all over the place. He was all about walking, running, and getting into everything imaginable. So my sister and I had a seriously good laugh about the alcohol wipe lady when we sat at the table. All I could think to say (although of course I didn't actually say it) was 'lady, in 6 or 8 months, this kid is going to be eating dirt. What are you going to do then?'

Then today, on MSN, I see an article about the hygiene hypothesis, which is basically the idea that by sticking our kids in overhygienic environments, we are preventing their immune systems from being exposed to pathogens during their formative years, which is when your immune system is configuring itself to deal with whatever substances it is going to encounter throughout your life. As a result, they grow up with weakened immune systems, which means that they sometimes develop hypersensitivity to those pathogens later in life. In other words, severe allergies.

So not only was this woman wasting her time protecting her son from nonexistent germs that he was going to be exposed to later, but by preventing him from being exposed to reasonable amounts of these things at the right time, she was making it more likely that he would be much sicker later in life.

Seems like a perfect representation of most of the modern thoughts on childraising, where the so-called experts identify some problem or other, but the suggested solutions actually exacerbate the problem, rather than solving it. I'm sure I'll post more about this at some point, but right now it's bedtime...