Bubble Warp – A guest post by Cedar Sanderson

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt
Bubble Warp – A guest post by Cedar Sanderson
I was working at an indoor playground this weekend, and in between the mad rush of what I was doing, I overheard parents talking about their children. I’m an inveterate eavesdropper, it comes with the writer brain, perhaps, or maybe just the oversized curiosity bump I’ve got. Anyway, I heard the same line of thought, but from several people, mothers and fathers, through the four hours I was listening. “Oh, don’t go on that, honey, you could get hurt.” To another adult “I think he’s less likely to get hurt on that structure. The big blue one looks like trouble.”

 

Now, I’m not suggesting that we as parents ought not to protect our children from harms. I’m all for vaccination and will fight for that as a scientist in a couple of years when it’s my job. I’m not suggesting we let the children climb on the cliff without a rope (and harness, and carabiners, and proper belay, and ascenders… but with those, let ‘er rip, kid!). I am suggesting that swaddling them in bubble wrap is harmful to their long term health. We must let them come to a little harm, because it will strengthen them for the adult life they must eventually enter.

 

As we bring home infants, we sterilize the house, doing our best to rid every nook and cranny of any conceivable microbe. Culturally, we have been doing this for almost a century, and science is discovering with alarm that the effects of over cleanliness and modern medicine are actually damaging our health. Ever wondered why there are now regulations against having peanut butter sandwiches in school? Well, the human immune system is like an engine with the governor taken off, and when the illnesses, dirt, and parasites are taken out of the equation, it is spinning out of control into an increasing array of allergies, autoimmune disorders, and possibly even Alzheimer’s Disease. (http://emph.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/08/11/emph.eot015.full.pdf+html)

 

Is letting the kid eat that worm he just grubbed out of the garden the solution? Um… probably not. But letting him roll around in the mud and play with the puppy, rather than penned up in a sterile house, might just help. Getting rid of antibacterial products (look for triclosan on the list of ingredients) will help conserve both your family’s health, and that of our environment. Look, I’m no eco-happy environmentalist, and I definitely not a ZPG whack-a-doo, but I was raised to be a conservationist. If you destroy it, and it doesn’t come back, you’ll starve. So don’t overhunt, but don’t underhunt, either. But that’s a whole ‘nother topic.

 

As the kid gets older, accept that sometimes he will fall off the slide doing something dumb, like not coming down feet-first. There will be tears. There may even be blood, and stitches, and a trip to the ER. It’s a rite of passage, and it won’t leave permanent trauma. Unless you make it that way. I remember vividly reading a passage in a favorite book about the best way to make a child terrified of something, whether it was a snake, or a bug… freak out, as a parent, where the child can see you. If you lose it, your toddler learns that this is the correct and appropriate reaction to the stimulus. Which isn’t so bad when it comes to a big hairy spider (and freakin’ hilarious when that toddler is grown into a 200 lb 6’ guy screaming like a little girl in the woods at a web on his face), but what are we teaching school children with zero-tolerance policies?

 

That poptart in the shape of a gun? Kids have been playing muskets versus knights since gunpowder hit the battlefield. Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers… point a finger, pick up a stick and voila, a weapon. It’s not training them to be violent, if anything it’s teaching the opposite. Actions have consequences. I was brought up with the catechism “don’t shoot it unless you mean to kill it. Don’t kill it unless you mean to it it, or it was going to kill you.” I had a healthy respect for guns as tools from a child. Just like I wouldn’t touch Dad’s circular saw, or stick my fingers in the toaster. Respect, not blind helpless fear. No wonder kids get to be bitter teens and decide guns are the way to get the adults to listen to them, they are taught from very small that guns are the ultimate evil. No young thug ever went on a rampage with power tools, which are almost as deadly, nor even explosives. Guns are the demons of modern society, so they are the ultimate symbol to the hopeless rebels. Teach respect for a gun as a tool, and you take away that handle.

 

Is it too late? Are we so wrapped up in our communal cocoon of bubble wrap that there is no way out? I don’t know. I know my kids grew up playing outside, living in a house with no year-round climate control. They ate fresh garden produce, sometimes outside, standing where they had picked it, without so much as a rub on their pants to knock off the dust, first. They knew where my hunting rifle was, and they knew not to touch it (I’m pretty sure they didn’t know where the ammo was, but you never know). I took my eldest through hunter safety at the age of twelve, and she loved it. They sometimes snagged a bit of cookie dough before baking, or licked the brownie batter off the spoon. They seem to be doing just fine.

 

My Dad has a greenhouse (Ok, Dad, proper terminology, it’s a high tunnel) and we raised produce in it for a few years before I moved off the Farm. Tomatoes, starts for spring, strawberries, all good and yummy in the fullness of time. But first, in spring, once the starts were ready to go out, we had to go through a process of ‘hardening off’ the tender sprouts. You see, they aren’t ready to just go in the ground. You must get them used to the harsh sun, cool nights, and the wind. It will kill them if you transition to abruptly. Children are the same way. If they aren’t exposed to the buffets of real life, when they must stand on their own, they will collapse in a tangle like the tomatoes who have never felt wind. They won’t grow straight and sturdy, and they might die.

 

Get them ready. Let them take that fall. Don’t rush over, screaming and crying. Wait. See what happens. He may just sit up, look around, and when he’s not being paid attention to, stand up, dust himself off, and go back to his play. It’s all right, you don’t need to be on hand for every moment of every day. It’s not good for him, and it’s not healthy for you. Unwind the bubble wrap, and let your chick stretch his wings and grow strong.

 

179 thoughts on “Bubble Warp – A guest post by Cedar Sanderson”

  1. Pingback: Bubble Warp | Cedar Writes

  2. This reminds me of something I read ages ago, a study that suggested, no, I’m serious about this, that kids eating their boogers was good for the immune system (something about killed bacteria in the mucous).

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      1. Oh, I wouldn’t suggest it, but not freaking out about it is close enough.

        My epidemiologist friend says, “If my kids happen to get some horseshit in their mouth when they’re playing around the barn, no big deal.”

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        1. To this day I can drink out of creeks that will make other people deathly ill, because I did it all the time growing up and my body is immune to it.

          Oh and Cedar I had to grin at the comment about not even rubbing the fruits and vegetables on their pants first, this is how I was taught to clean fresh-picked produce as a kid, and can recall getting yelled at for not wiping carrots clean enough before eating.

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            1. Eh, I don’t like the skin on a carrot, and would take out a pocket knife and skin it. Of course, that may be the same knife that I cleaned fish with the day before…

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            1. I will wash things that have been in the ground, but everybody always tells me to wash off things like tomatoes straight from the garden because “you don’t know what’s on there.” Okay, yes, the air is pretty dirty in the summer—and by that I mean literal dirt, as in “wash the outdoor furniture off every other week lest it looks grubby”—but I don’t use pesticides or herbicides or anything other than water and compost in my garden. Besides, who can wait?

              At this point, the only issue is that the younger child appears to have a bit of a (pollen-based) tomato allergy, and she’s not old enough to not want to eat them.

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          3. We used to call the spring west of the old house “DDT water,” because it made one of the cousin’s new wife sick, we think.

            Never a problem for us’ns weaned on it. Apples, blackberries, honeysuckle straight from the bush. We only got blessed out for ripping good clothes when we played, not for getting them all bloody.

            Growing up, we didn’t know how good we had it, that things could come to, well, this for some folks. Good to know that there’s other little ‘uns growing up good and right- and getting to actually be kids, not cellophane-wrapped mini-me’s.

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            1. Strawberries and tomatoes from Granny’s garden, radishes occasionally, cherry’s off the tree down the way, berries wherever hands could be laid on ’em. Dirt, mud, lakewater, streams, bugs…

              I’ve laid tooth to any number of interesting things. I even did some of it when I was a child and had an excuse.

              As you say, didn’t know how good I had it. Wandering my Grandmother’s fields or the hometown neighborhoods, mucking about in all sorts of interesting things, nary a care. Fantastic childhood, now called neglect.

              My mom was (is) very much of the “blood not spurting, bone not showing, no need for drama” school. Many’s the time I got the once over for real damage and the admonishment to “Go clean it up. And scrub.“

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                1. Depends on the garden. If the gardener just plants and weed, I’ll eat off the plant, but if they’re the “spray it with every insecticide known to man” type, I’ll wash it off first, or just skip it altogether. I’m more worried about some of those chemicals than the odd bug. (and I don’t particularly like bugs in my food)

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                2. I gross people out by picking wild fruit and eating it. “No one sprayed it, it’s OK” does nothing to mollify them, nor does offering to share. Which is fine by me.

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                  1. I guess they would really flip out if they saw something like when my dad was picking blackberries, put one in his mouth, then spit it out saying, “Damn stinkbugs”?

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                    3. I agree. I had a huge Italian prune tree where I used to live. Those made the best eating ever. Even better than cherries or blackberries. And you have not had prunes till you’ve made them yourself.

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                    4. Wait, those things grow into trees? Like, real trees, not honorary ones?

                      Is it a water thing?

                      One of the best parts of riding in the dry side of Washington and the damp parts of Nevada is coming across some old ranch’s orchard of Italian plumbs* that you can see over if you stay on horseback. It’s especially great for me, because I’m a runt and there’s finally a fruit tree that I can easily pick off of; there’s a plumb tree out back here as well, that looks almost exactly like a runty cherry tree and isn’t nearly as good…..

                      *as best I can tell, the “prune/plumb” distinction is very iffy, with only a slight tendency for prunes to be dried

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                    5. Yes, next time you get home bring some pits back with you to the West side. My mom grew one over there from a pit, and it was a real tree. Last I seen it at about twenty years old it was 30-40 feet tall and over a foot on the butt. Only problem was on a good year it would get so many plums on it that it would break the upper limbs that you couldn’t reach to pick them off. Yes I was surprised when I moved over here and not only do they grow wild along with the yellow coyote plums and little red plums, but their “trees” are about the same size, I can reach the tops of most of them, no matter how old they are.

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                    1. Gathering hazelnuts from the bushes in the housing area we lived in… Blackberries along the back boundary. Can’t disagree with you, SD/C.

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                  4. Black haws, blackberries, mulberries…

                    Now, most of the time mulberries called for at least a rinse before consumption. Made us much happier NOT to ingest the spiders and ants and other insects that infested the fruit. Blackberries were easier to handle, just brush off the dust and ants. (Someone else mentioned cherries? The birds kept stripping the tree before we got there — one of the last years it produced our edible harvest was 17 cherries. Seventeen. Waaaaah!!!)

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                  1. Mine is fenced for the deer, but it effectively keeps dogs out also. Cats go in it, but I figure I will notice any cat crap buried amongst the carrots or onions while pulling them, everything else is either above or below the level of cat crap. Besides my cats prefer the loose bark in my woodshed. GRRRrr! :(

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              2. My mother’s an RN, who worked ER (by choice) for many years. Very much of that school. My brothers and I were convinced that even if we ran in with one arm lopped off and carried in the other hand the first words we’d hear would be “hold still, be quiet, and let me look at that”. Not that she didn’t care, but by both personality and training her first reaction would be to deal with the problem rather than spend any time on comforting the victim. She also had little-to-no patience with self-pity or malingering.

                On the other hand, she had no problems with us disappearing into the fields or hills all day long as long as she knew what our plans were and when we expected to be back. And she dealt with my next-youngest brother’s habit of bringing home live bugs, frogs, lizards, or snakes in his pockets with equanimity (the baby rattlesnake incident aside).

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          4. I have drank from swamp ponds and ditches in a swampy forest at times, as long as the water looked clean and didn’t smell bad. Never got sick. Don’t know if I’d do it in a more southern country though (unless absolutely necessary), our winters may help keep things a bit more clean.

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                1. It’s pretty common habit with people my age, or used to be, I started to do it because I saw others doing it, and I don’t know of anyone who got sick. So maybe the waters just are a bit safer here.

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                  1. Giardia is a parasite rather than a microbe – once rare in the mountain west it is now ubiquitous in the Western U.S. of A.. As a practical matter travel there now demands carrying more water – pretty heavy at a pint’s a pound the world around – and more expensive filters and other water purification. It likely would have slowed the movement west if Giardia (beaver fever) had been so wide spread and common at the time. Observed by van Leeuwenhoek and found lots of places. I suspect infected people doing what comes naturally have been a major vector spreading the parasite to previously lightly infected drainages at least in the U.S. of A..

                    Using open water sources in WWI is commonly cited in discussions of Tolkien’s dead marshes and such with tales of using at least the ice from open bodies of water with war dead in them. Some folks did prefer to boil the water for tea. Ice is of course a pretty good purifier.

                    Notice that ragweed to which many Americans are allergic is not native to Europe – I suspect but will never know that many people would show allergic to things foreign to their exposure. For many people allergic reactions are a tipping point thing. Low doses will be ignored until a triggering incident and area under the curve so to speak will be as significant as peak level of exposure.

                    Most folks are more allergic to dust mites than to dust – a lot of real dust is quartz fibers and other inorganic matter. In Colorado it’s possible to avoid dust mites by living at elevation – dust mites are not well adapted to dry cold air.

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                    1. No idea if you have Giardia in Finland or not, I’m immune to it, but always advise others to treat their water before drinking. I prefer iodine tablets to water filters myself, because I don’t like filtered water, it has no flavor. But I’ve been called strange for liking iodine flavored water. The water purification tablets are much lighter to pack than filters and more convenient than boiling. Besides it is always great to give someone unsuspecting iodine treated water to make their instant oatmeal with. :) Good chemistry lesson for kids, also.

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                    2. I know there is Giardia in more southern parts of Europe, but maybe not in Finland, at least northern Finland where I have done most of my long distance hiking. Close to the Arctic circle or north of it. I have drank from surface water, lakes and creeks in southern Finland too, but way less since I haven’t done as long hikes here so I usually could carry enough bottled water or something similar. And in Lapland most people just drank the water as long as it looked clean, at least back then, you’d boil it only when you wanted coffee or tea. If you count the summers I did map there it comes to well over 12 months, altogether. Close to two years if you also count the summers I worker in southern Finland. Never had any problems, apart from that one time I ate the wrong mushrooms (or mushroom, they were picked by somebody else and I was the only one who got sick, some projectile vomiting and so on, so our guess was that there had been maybe one and that ended on my plate. Of course.).

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              2. Wouldn’t work elsewhere, and if there’s any reasonable number of either people or animals that might have human interested diseases, you’re playing russian roulette.

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      1. kids absolutely need time to be together without adult supervision. I don’t mean no supervision, just some unsupervised play time. They won’t learn how to be on their own and how to interact with other children if they are always supervised. They will (some of them) remain dependent if don’t take steps towards independence in childhood. If a child is joined at the hip to his mother/father until he is 18 or 21, he will not know how, or want to separate from the parent and become a self-sufficient adult.

        Childhood should be (in part) a time when a child learns and tries out skills for independent living so that by the time he or she is no longer a child he or she is ready to leave home and be an adult.

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        1. When my daughter was 8 to about 12, we lived in an ‘urbanization’ on the outskirts of Zaragoza, Spain. An ‘urbanization’ is what in the US is called a development – it was a fairly high-class one; no gates, but there were a couple of private security guards. They were real professionals, who knew who lived there, what their cars looked like, and kept a very good eye on everything. My daughter had her own bicycle, and pretty much had permission to go anywhere she liked with her friends in the urbanization. The kids with their bikes were like a flock of seagulls, I used to think – there was a candy store and a grocery in the urbanization, a swimming pool, and another huge waterpark a short bicycle-ride away. I never worried about her, out and about on her bicycle. The kids came and went, pursuing their own amusements. The streets were narrow, no one dared speed, so the kids were quite safe – and Juan Vigilante, the senior watchman, kept very good track of strangers. Only after we came back to the States did I think how rare that experience was for my daughter. In the new neighborhood where we lived, she had friends and walked to their houses, and to school, and to various amusements – but the bicycle went into the shed, and she hardly ever rode it after that.

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        2. Unsupervised play time is easy if you have one or more children involved. Put them in a secured area cleared of extreme hazards (such as black widow spiders, deadfalls, and things like that)—which can be a backyard, if you’re not in one of those developments that has NO yard space. Make sure there are some basic things to play with, such as a sandbox, a trampoline (hey, the new ones are actually pretty safe), or a pile of sticks, and then let them go at it.

          I have two kids, and last summer was the year they were both old enough (5 and 3) to play without me watching over them. It was gold. They’d go back there—or to their room—for hours at a time, and I didn’t have to do ANYTHING. I can’t believe parents who are so over-protective that they won’t do that…

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      2. I wonder – if there are no physical risks in the environment to experience, does this lead (at least some) kids to find other risks? E.g. rough-housing that includes the extra dig with the elbow, bullying, etc.?

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  4. Preach on sister! :)

    I didn’t know how much my mom hated snakes until I was older, because she didn’t want me to be afraid of them, so she taught me how to pick them up when I was a little kid (we lived where there were no poisonous snakes).

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    1. The other day I watched with amusement as a classmate flipped out over a little brown beetle that had ventured into the classroom. Poor little bug got stepped on before I got to him. But it’s a learned behaviour, sadly.

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      1. I’m not scared of snakes and amphibians. I have a phobic reaction. It’s not fear, though. It’s more I hate the feel of their skin and just the prospect of touching it makes me ill.

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    2. *giggle* I had a father who realized that early on (when I was about three and a half, and my next-younger brother two) that he could not protect us from rattlesnakes in the hills where we lived then. So he set to work to teach us all about them – including catching the harmless king snakes and letting us handle them. I grew up with absolutely no fear of snakes whatsoever. In high school biology class, I was the only student eager and happy to handle the snake that the teacher kept in an aquarium in the back of the classroom. Yeah, some of the boys volunteered to handle it after I did, but they didn’t enjoy it at all, and only did it because they didn’t want to be out-fearlessed by a girl.

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      1. We have 2 pet snakes, just colorful little corn snakes, which are actually native to the SE USA. Anyway, people have one of two reactions when they see them — either fascination and “can I hold it?” or utter reflexive repugnance. Interesting contrast.

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      2. My mom’s a farm gal, so I started handling various critters as soon as I was old enough to avoid squishing ’em. Relocating various beneficial worms/insects/amphibians/snakes/what-have-you as the gardening was done.

        Snakes have never bothered me, and I find the reaction of some disconcerting. My grandmother, for instance, hates them. Passionately. And I was always a little startled at her reaction.

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        1. One of the best things I did as a little kid was taking an “enrichment class” at the local natural history museum that had us cleaning out cages and feeding various animals, and then handling them a little. Obviously we weren’t handling or feeding the poisonous snakes, but I got to handle the corn snakes and king snakes and such.

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          1. We could be fancy and call it ‘familiarization’ but I prefer the much simpler ‘fun!’

            WP abandoned me and left comment subscription languishing until almost 4am. Between that and other events I’m behind. Apologies to anybody as needed.

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      3. My dad taught us how to catch (non-poisonous) snakes and lizards (use a white cloth in the latter case, because they can’t decipher the lack of shadows very well.) This meant that one morning, when I walked into the science classroom at my all-girls’ school and saw that the storage room was shut, and somebody volunteered that it was because the king snake had gotten out, I shrugged, went in, and came out two minutes later holding a large snake. Which nobody else wanted to touch while it was out, silly people.

        This also means that one time my dad walked into the house draped in fake snakes, and was disappointed that we didn’t react. “Well, Dad, they’re not real, so they’re not that interesting…”

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    3. My mom didn’t really HATE snakes, but she didn’t want ’em in her house. It was three months before she discovered the six-foot green ribbon snake I had in my desk, though. Thing would eat crickets, grasshoppers, and whatever else I brought to him. I grew up where there were LOTS of snakes, from garter snakes to nine-foot bull snakes, and all four poisonous snakes found in the US. I don’t mind snakes. I’ll catch even the poisonous ones. I DON’T like spiders and cockroaches. One of many reasons I don’t live in the south.

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      1. LOL. Bugs don’t bother me. In both my families (birth and here) I’m the bug-getter. The guys will scream like little girls until I come, get the critter and put it outside (or elsewhere, depending. Spiders are useful.)

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        1. I loved the tobacco-spitting grasshoppers but for some reason my sister didn’t like me holding them in front of her face. [Evil Grin]

          Oh ladies, my beloved sister got back at me plenty of times growing up. [Smile]

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      2. Spiders okay, cockroaches way less so. I have no idea how I became scared of bugs, while at the same time I really like spiders and have no problems handling them. I also like snakes, lizards and all kinds of amphibians. But roaches and some other that type of bugs can make me freak out. And millipedes.

        Weird.

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        1. I freaked out the first time I saw a cockroach in the US… but only because it was so small. See, the roaches in São Paulo are at least the size of my thumb, so when I saw this tiny little roach, my brain said “baby”. Which would be a very, very bad thing. My lovely bride had to explain to me that no, that was an adult, and she looked a little boggled and squeamish when I explained why I was freaked out. I spared describing to her how you can actually see daylight underneath them when they get up and run, they’re so big. :) That roach was funny – it turned out to be the only one in the apartment (which almost never happens), and we were never able to catch or kill it. I ended up naming it Cory (if you can’t beat ’em, adopt them), and he was still living there when we moved on. Our first pet. :D

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          1. In the southeast (South Carolina and FL) we have these things called “Palmetto Bugs” – a pretty and euphemistic name for tracking nuclear cockroaches…… many of which are the size of an adult thumb, and when they take flight sounds like a helicopter taking off..

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            1. They used to fly in if our door was open, in Charlotte, and go sit on the cathedral ceiling where we couldn’t reach. So Dan got a dart gun. late at night, he’d lie down on the sofa and shoot palmetto bugs. Why, yes, my husband is a nerd. or cool. or both.

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          1. Yes, where I live we don’t have any seriously poisonous spiders (possibly one or two rarer species, something that seems to be under debate, but none of the common ones is dangerous to adult, healthy humans). I would avoid them somewhere like Australia.

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            1. We DO get spiders in the house, so I ask them to be identified by the two adult Aussies in residence. (I don’t count yet.) We tend not to kill the spiders, just re-release them into the back yard. Even the black widow cousin, the redback, gets sent back outside.

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              1. I’m a rather serious arachnophobe, so I have an… understanding with the spiders. If I am in their territory – generally defined as “outside my house” – I leave them alone. If they get in my space, either coming in the house or crawling on me, they die. Generally accompanied by the proclamation, “You were warned.” I’ve taught the minions to keep the same agreement, and they are scolded if they harm a spider outside the house. I respect spiders, and I appreciate what they do for my home, family, and garden, I just can’t tolerate their presence. It’s a totally irrational, visceral reaction. In what is certainly a fortuitous coincidence, I’ve had very few spiders in the house on either continent in the years since I made that pact.

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                1. I on the other hand apparently had a hatch a couple weeks ago. I must have killed ten one evening sitting in my living room. I don’t have a problem with spiders or other bugs, but have the same agreement with them that you do, except for stinkbugs. Stinkbugs get killed outside or inside, under the assumption that any stinkbug that is outside is only there because it is patiently waiting for you to open the door so it can zoom in the house.

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  5. Unfortunately, I had to watch my older son like a hawk when he was playing around other children, because he was so large and energetic, and on top of that, careless. This boy used the door frame as a bumper to make turns from the living room into the dining room. Zoom, BAM! Zoom, and never slowing down. If he accidentally ran into another child like that, they could easily have wound up in the hospital. And nothing I did could get him to listen.

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    1. Yes. We trained Robert so hard out of hitting or even being enthusiastic around other kids, just because he was SO massive three feet three and fifty pounds at two, that we were afraid he’d put another kid in the hospital.

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      1. Chris found his own way around it, by finding a couple of friends who were older than he was, and even bigger.

        I don’t remember exactly how big he was at what age, only that the doctors routinely said he was between the 95th and 98th percentile for height and weight, and he was generally a head taller than everyone in his class.

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        1. A cousin of mine (not positive on how many removed he was, we just said second cousin) was a massive kid too, When he was in second grade, the school made him go over and play football or what ever was going on with the 4th and 5th graders, then when they complained, with the 6th and 7th graders.
          He was a bit smaller than the last group, but still hard hitting and fearless as only a kid like that can be so he still was a bit too hard hitting for our like. His little brother was a bit scrawny until he hit his teens then shot up and was nearly the equal to his big brother. When in the Navy they both were deeper in the chest than my dad was wide across the shoulders, and dad was well built for 5’3″.

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          1. I simply could NOT convince that boy that he should play football on a team. Because of some other things, like being able to track multiple things at once, very well, I suspect he would have been good enough to get a college scholarship, if he listened to a good coach.

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    2. Growing up the standard rule when playing sports was, “no blood, no foul.” Well except football and floor hockey, blood didn’t necessarily mean a foul in them. But when I actually played organized basketball one year I struggled with the concept of unnecessary roughness. And I was always the one the turned to at the end of the game when you tried to foul them as soon as they got the ball, to stop the clock. :)

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  6. Speaking of peanut allergies–I recall reading an article that said peanuts have a toxin that young children can’t handle, so peanuts, peanut butter, etc. should not be given to them until after age 3 or so. Could that also be the cause of the big uptick in peanut allergies? Very young children getting fed peanut products?

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    1. Um… or avoiding feeding them. I didn’t feed older son honey because I’d been told if you fed honey to very young kids they could get some issue — turned out it was only RAW honey — so I fed it to younger kid. Older kid who didn’t have it till 3 is allergic, younger isn’t.

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      1. Supposedly honey can cause a type of hepatitis in children younger than 1 year, and yes, it makes a lot more sense if it’s raw honey we’re talking about, since almost all processed honey is raised to (I think) 160F for about 4 hours during processing.

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          1. Yup. Had honey and whiskey as a flue remedy when I was small. Spoonful. Yes, raw honey.

            I still have a sweet tooth for the good stuff. *chuckle*

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            1. If your flue needs remedying I would recommend a chap with a stiff brush and a bad Cockney accent.

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          2. It’s the botulotoxin in raw honey. Older kids and adults can handle it, but babies are not up to the job yet. After age three is OK, according to the family pediatrician/grandparent. And peanut butter has proteins in it that can sensitize some kids (as do other things like fish and tree nuts and strawberries), which is one reason to wait on introducing those foods longer than on grains and some fruit.

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            1. The botulism doesn’t have a chance to develop unless the infant has constipation and that stops the progress of food through the gut. So it’s rare, but that’s why they say not to feed to an infant.

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          3. And the way they usually get sick is basic tummy trouble, not– well, deathly illness.

            Our (good) baby doctor explained this when I asked how old the third should be before honey, because his sisters feed him peanut butter and the stuff I buy has honey in it.

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        2. One of my uncles was an exterminator. His company was called to a house to get rid of “bees in the attic”. My uncle brought my dad a #3 washtub FULL of raw honey, most still in the comb. I was ten or eleven at the time, and I literally got SICK of honey before it was all gone. Mom put up I don’t know HOW many quarts of the sticky stuff, and we had beeswax candles for years after that.

          Growing up in the South, running wild on six hundred or more acres of pine forest, picking blackberries and huckleberries in season, being stung by virtually every species of bee and wasp imaginable, it’s a good thing I never had any allergies… A few of the kids in the neighborhood did, but mostly to processed foods. Dad had a garden every year, we had fig and plum trees, picked mayhaws (a kind of crabapple) for jelly, home canning garden products, we raised chickens, rabbits, turkeys, pigs, and cows, drank raw milk, and all the other no-no things of today. Most of my classmates in school are still alive, and some of them are a lot healthier than I am! We’ve never bubble-wrapped ours, even the one that is allergic to everything, including dirt.

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          1. I had probably been stung around a hundred times growing up before I developed an allergic reaction to bees. And I was pretty allergic to them (not bad enough to go to the hospital IF I took Benadryl immediately after being stung, but bad enough that even with the Benadryl I would have a reaction roughly similar to drinking a fifth of booze, and would swell up for several days) until I moved East of the Mountains.

            Interesting fact I know over a dozen people here in Northern Idaho that were allergic to bees when they lived on the coast (Washington, Oregon, and California) several of them deathly allergic, none of them have more than a ‘slightly more swollen than normal’ reaction to the local bees.

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            1. I stepped into a yellow-jacket nest when I was about fifteen. I was barefoot, wearing loose jeans and no shirt. I had 65 stings below my waist, mostly on one leg, plus dozens more on my arms, neck and back. Mom was a nurse, and treated me for shock, but other than that, did nothing unusual. She had called the hospital and told them what happened, and was about to get my neighbors to help carry me to the car when I got up on my own and walked out the door. The doctor that examined me couldn’t believe I wasn’t half-dead.

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              1. When I tell people that it’s a miracle that my brother and I lived to see our 18th birthday, they don’t believe me. Even my wife didn’t believe me until she listened to my mother saying that one of the reasons she went into nursing was that she knew she was going to have to nurse one or both of us as invalids for the rest of our lives. My dad used to get a great kick out of telling the story of my stepping into the yellow-jacket nest. Somehow, we made it! Not well, but we made it… 8^)

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      2. My brother was born 2 months premature. When he came home from the hospital, we fed him with the milk from our dairy goats and a little honey. The milk was nearly straight from the goat. The honey was from the honey our neighboring beekeeper paid as rental for letting some of his hives be on our property. He grew up just fine, without any allergies that I know of.

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        1. I was going to say that all the old milk substitutes I was familiar with for human babies used honey (I thought it was supposed to be raw, because it had something in it that was killed in the pasteurizing).

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            1. Anecdotal, but I do this every year now. Bees are fed on wildflowers a smidge east of here in North Kakalaky and sold at flea markets where he beats the pants off those sugar-fed honey jars all week and twice as bad on Sunday. Seems to help.

              Also, I like honey on my pancakes. Totally unrelated, I promise!

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          2. Raw honey is the most dangerous, but if it’s not filtered there’s still a CHANCE of the botulism spores being in it. There’s something about a young stomach that allows them to attack when adult stomachs ignore them.

            As best I can tell, it’s really uncommon– kind of like how those body builders eating a dozen raw eggs usually didn’t end up with deathly food poisoning.

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            1. Or cookie dough? :) Yeah, I ate raw eggs every day in high school, and still eat raw cookie dough every time I make cookies. I have an aunt that freaks out whenever she sees someone eat raw cookie dough throwing a raving fit that they are going to get salmonella. I kindly forbore mentioning that her daughters grandparents, aunts and uncles, and myself allow her daughters to eat it whenever she isn’t looking. Because I would really hate to be the one responsible for her heart attack.

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    2. There appears to actually be a connection between *pollen* and food allergies—the types of flowering trees around can sensitize you to certain proteins. This is why peanut allergies are less common outside of the U.S., and why parts of Europe have a common apple allergy.

      Incidentally, the biggest correlation between severe allergies and other factors seems to be a lack of parasites, extended to overly-clean homes. (Families with dogs and cats tend to produce children less subject to severe allergies.) A treatment for life-threatening allergies is actually a tapeworm pill—which pretty much limits that treatment to people who are truly desperate.

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      1. Kind of ironic, my husband and his sister both had VERY mild asthma and some mild allergies– and I think it’s because their dad smoked.

        Not because they were exposed to the smoking– he’s more careful about keeping folks away from his smoking than some pot smokers I’ve seen– but because everyone was working so hard to make sure they weren’t exposed to it, so everything to scrubbed crazy.

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  7. The “don’t freak out or your kid will” is absolutely true. I had a friend who worked summers as a life guard. As kids are wont to do, they would run, trip and skin their knees or legs pretty badly on the rough cement around the pools. On occasion the parent was not around at the time and so the kid would be brought back to the first aid station, get the wound cleaned out and bandaged up, sometimes with a good bit of blood on the towels. Since all the life guards had seen it before, it was old hat and they acted that way. The kids as a consequence after a few sniffles would take the lead of the lifeguards. That is, until their parents showed up. Without fail, my friend noticed that if the parent started freaking out (either about the blood, the injury in the first place or even just one of the entitled “how could you let this happen to my child”) the child instantly followed suit and what was moments before a calm if hurt child was now a screaming terrified whirlwind.

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    1. I noticed the same with the kids in my daughter’s day-care class. If no one freaked out, the kids were pretty blasé about the bumps, scrapes and bruises. If the parent went into panicky over-drive, the kid would be howling its head off.
      I encouraged my daughter to be stoic about ‘owies’ by telling her that if I didn’t see any blood, I didn’t want to see any tears either. Sounds a bit heartless, but I didn’t want her to be ‘a screaming terrified whirlwind.’

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      1. I’ve had people at parks be amazed at how my kids brush off the bumps and bruises. I knew this advice before I became a parent, and by golly it works really well.

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    2. Hagakure says you shouldn’t scare your kids. I’ll admit this may have more of a context of ‘for kicks and grins’, or ‘to make yourself feel better’, but it may be another side of the coin.

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    3. Several young-parent friends of ours have a similar way of dealing with kid-crashes: You hear the crash, you look up. If kid comes to you, he’s mobile so that part’s ok. Ask the kid “are you bleeding?” – if answer’s “No…”, then respond with big smile “you’re ok, then.” Kid smiles, goes off, keeps playing.

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  8. From what I understand, the whole filth a prevents a allergies thing is largely talking about levels of filth that are not easy to acheive in a modern society. Open privies, dead animals lying around levels of filth. I wish people would not be so quick to blame mothers for allergies. (Yes, blaming mothers for everything from autism to homosexuality has always been a national sport, but we don’t have to indulge.)

    I am not a very good housekeeper. I have never bought antibacterial anything, and my kids spend their time out at Grandma’s farm, playing with chickens and dirt. Their summers are spent in the creek or in a farm pool so horrifying that it will either give us immune systems of steel or kill us all.

    My oldest daughter also started showing signs of food allergies by the time she was six months old. Today she is almost never sick, but her list of allergenic foods is as long as her arm.

    It’s very nice to feel smug about letting your kids go barefoot and pat yourself on the back for avoiding allergies. But we know very little about allergies really. My kid is just as barefoot as yours (and carries a pocketknife, and enjoys shooting), but there is a random component to this stuff, and some genetics. To some extent, it seems to be luck.

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    1. The statements above are meant as a general rule, not a 100%, everyone will benefit from this, statement. People are different, and some people are going to have problems no matter how they are raised.

      The fact is, there are far more people with health problems related to their immune systems than there used to be. Some people blame this on modern foods (colorants, preservatives, and such – as well as GMO foods), and there may be SOME influence there, but many of those things were being added to food before the problems began to rise so steeply. And as was stated, there is research pointing to the possibility that this is at least partially related to not allowing children to be exposed to enough things that test their immune system at a young age.

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      1. Actually, even more, the statements above were intended as a metaphor for our over-protective society, that coddles children and produces overly-entitled, irresponsible adults. Sort of a mental vaccination, letting kids be kids and learn how to grow up and deal with the big bumps and bruises later in life.

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      2. Or it could be the fact we don’t have parasites, like intestinal worms. that likely has a lot to do with the “obesity epidemic” too…
        Note I’m not advocating it.

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          1. There has been that story circulating about somebody who deliberately got some sort of parasite infection on a trip to Africa to cure his severe allergy or some sort of autoimmune disease. No idea how reliable that story is (nor do I remember any details). Anybody else remember that one? Supposedly it worked.

            And yes, from the stories I remember from my childhood, pretty much everybody (or maybe not quite everybody, the older generations who had grown up on small farms loved to cross out kids like me, growing up in towns and cities and just visiting those farms :) ) probably had tapeworm here until about 60 – 70 years ago.

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      3. Or it may simply be a situation like cancer, where some expression may have been masked by people dying of other causes first.

        If a person is naturally sensitive to just about anything, such that all sorts of innocent things can be a problem, they are at a greater risk of dying young when infant mortality is high.

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        1. That might be part of it. Without modern medicine, my son and I would have died when he was born. Wouldn’t have given me the opportunity to develop a more advanced form of the disorder I have now, and there wouldn’t have been a little girl with a long list of allergies born at all.

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      4. One thing I wonder about is if we have more people surviving immune system problems and allergies that would have killed earlier generation (our improved sanitation and medical care, for ex), and those are getting kept in the gene pool longer, so we see more of them for any given population group. How many people with truly serious gluten reactions died as kids before 1900? Unless you grew up in a rice-eating area, most of them, probably. *shrug* Just a theory, totally unprovable one way or another.

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        2. There’s also the factor that back in the day many of the disorders we now know by name were simply lumped into the category of “sickly.”

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        3. I know several people with severe gluten allergies (in varying forms, ranging from Crohn’s to hospitalization to “I don’t need drugs to sleep since cutting gluten out of my life.” The latter has a weird health history, BTW, so gluten insensitivity is likely the result and not the cause.) I can pretty much guarantee that some of them would be dead, some would just be dealing with chronic pain, and some of them would probably not have any problems at all due to other dietary changes—not gluten itself, but a whole host of other things that support a healthy intestinal culture that enables gluten to be digested properly.)

          If you think about Victorian literature, how often did they mention “gout” or other chronic complaints? Some of those may have been things we could diagnose today (though stomach complaints were often the cause of bad food storage.)

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      5. Despite there being the parable passed around by soccer moms about the butterfly needing to leave its chrysalis unattended or it never develops its wings, the number of helicopter parents (one literally had a camera-equipped 4-rotor help drone follow his kid to the bus stop…) these days who don’t let their kids fail at anything, get hurt, and completely overreact to any minor setback is skyrocketing.

        When one looks at natural systems, the design of the internet which mimics the decentralized nature of ecosystems in many ways to provide redundancy and resiliency, and other issues, when one looks at how workouts develop muscle, etc., it becomes pretty obvious that people NEED stress to develop, and to better handle stressors.

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    2. Certainly not blaming mothers, and it’s sad that you have felt to blame for your children’s health problems. No, this is a multi-generational thing, based on the state of medicine almost since the development of the germ theory. It may not be reversible, and it may not be prudent to attempt to reverse it. I am studying in the field now, and there is more known all the time. It’s fascinating, and it’s about far more than just allergies. But it is inescapable that countries with modern medicine for a considerable time have a far higher reported rate of allergies and auto-immune disorders than undeveloped countries.

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      1. I haven’t felt to blame. I can’t think of anything much I would do differently ‘(maybe rice milk instead of soy, but at the time soy milk was the thing to do. She grew out of the milk allergy by two, but is somewhat allergic to soy now). It’s just irritating when people say to me, as they have, that if I had just not been as overprotective and paranoid as I obviously must be, my kid would not have allergies. Heck, I have a friend whose little boy had leukemia, and people were telling her how she could have avoided it by being a different kind of mother.

        I think it’s kind of superstitious reflex; if only bad parents have kids with problems, and I’m a good parent, then nothing scary will happen to my kid. Therefore all problems are caused by bad parenting and I won’t have them. We do it all the time. I get it far less badly than parents of kids with mental issues.

        Sorry about the typing- I’m on a tablet and it is being wonky.

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        1. You know, we had tofu and stuff, but it was neither avoided nor a big party of our diet. BUT Robert is massively allergic to soy milk and, weirdly, so am I. so that at least seems to be genetic. How allergic? Projectile vomiting. We both have a weird stomach shape that makes throwing up almost impossible. So, syrup of ipecac never worked for him. … I kept a box of powdered soy milk, in case he got into something he shouldn’t. From a spoon of it to throw up, three minutes flat.

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        2. You have my sympathies. I have a kid with problems, not to be specified here, that are often attributed to “overbearing mother,” yet I was not overbearing, let my kids ***create*** mud puddles to play in, taught them to laugh at themselves when they “went boom,” etc. … yet sh*t still happens. It reminds me of my dear uncle, an evangelical pastor who never smoked a cigarette, drank an adult beverage, or played a hand of cards in his life — guess what he died of? Yah, primary lung cancer. So when I hear people say (about lung cancer patients) “I thought he didn’t smoke,” I want to rip their lungs out. Sorry, but we as a culture think we are WAY more in control of the world than we really are, and the natural extension of that is blaming the victim. It is evil.

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                1. it is coming full circle and they are again becoming good for you. Heard a nutritionist for trucker recommend eggs and bacon as a high protein start to the day to help lose weight.

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          3. Arrgh on the victim-blaming. Yes, 85% of lung cancer cases are caused by smoking (my father died of it more than a decade after he quit, alas, but that decade was good to him at least.) The remaining causes (15%, remember, and while that’s the minority, it’s not exactly negligible) are exposure to environmental causes such as radon or excessive pollution and (drumroll) GENETICS. Sometimes you just get dealt a bad hand.

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            2. I question even that 85% number, as the original studies had a HARD time linking cancer (and other diseases, like emphysema) to smoking.

              One of the biggest lies of modern times is that smoking (or any of a number of chemicals) causes cancer. It raises the chances of getting cancer, which is something that is caused by a genetic defect (either inherited or externally impressed, either by radiation or a DNA-altering chemical) in cells, which turns off one or more the attributes which limit their reproduction.

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              1. Yep, by their definition of ’cause’ the leading cause of cancer should be age. The older you get the more likely you are to develop cancer.

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              2. We’re not good, emotionally, at assigning the cause of something real, that’s right in front of us, to a probability.

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        3. You know a lot of the blame is people who decide they have allergies (or that their kids do) because allergies are the “in” thing, and being a victim is a good thing.

          Such people cause everyone else to at least subconsciously discount all those who claim to have allergies, because a significant percentage of them either don’t have allergies, or have such minor and easily compensated for reactions that those who actually have serious reactions are believed to be exaggerating.

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          1. It’s also a problem that there isn’t a strong distinction of severity. For instance, I have allergies—hay fever. It’s controllable by Claritin. My husband also has allergies—hay fever. He has to take multiple medications and avoid inhaling aerosolized plant matter (such as grass clippings kicked up by a lawn mower; guess whose job that is?) He has a 10+ allergy to grass clippings. And that doesn’t get into sulfites, which are sometimes used as a medical preservative. The KIDS have a note about sulfites in their files, even though we have no idea about any allergies for them, simply because his family has such a strong range of reactions to them. (He gets food poisoning but one of his siblings gets anaphylaxis.)

            But we both have “allergies.” It’s sort of a meaningless term at that point.

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        4. My daughter is allergic to milk, grains, various nuts and probably a few other things we haven’t identified. I have an autoimmune disorder that often has those allergies as symptoms. The closest we can track the cause to is the year and a half I kept getting strep. There was no way we could have known that me getting sick so often would result in my daughter, who is basically fearless even when she claims otherwise, to be allergic to a whole host of things. Her allergies have been used against me by so many people, it gets really tiring. She started showing symptoms at 6 months, too.

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    3. Well… I know when I came to the states at eighteen I thought everyone having allergies was weird. And mom was an excellent housekeeper, and no, we didn’t have open privies around. BUT I played in the fields as a kid, climbed down holes, etc.
      Now, that I’m much more indoors I have allergies to everything, including household dust. You figure it.

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        1. I have allergies, maybe near crippling. I also have an HVAC system that is really problematic in certain ways. I’ve been making some changes to fix things.

          Anyway, thank you. I haven’t thought enough about this, and now I’m wondering if I ought to look up an engineer I know of who knows HVAC.

          The outside often makes me sicker than the building I live in, but I’ve found that there are other buildings where I just clear up if I spend enough time in them.

          I’d note that the new thing of ducts lined on the inside with fiberglass may be problematic.

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          1. ” … there are other buildings where I just clear up if I spend enough time in them.”

            Find out what they’re doing differently than your system and copy it! Maybe your HVAC engineer can figure that out.

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  9. We had a good medical freak-out at our house two weeks ago–the kids freaked out, I called 911 and made the kid who caused the injury clean up the blood on floors and walls while I tried to stop the bleeding on the injured kid. Calling 911 I guess is my version of panicking. The end results were nine stitches in the five-year-old’s finger, two of which were internal, and now he has a pretty gruesome scar to show off.
    The injury was caused by the ten-year-old, who thought it was a great idea to engage in the forbidden activity of smashing lumps of dirt on the sidewalk with a log intended for the fireplace. The interesting thing is that there was no infection from this, in spite of dirt, log, and sidewalk. To be sure, two different nurses washed the wound (the pediatrician was going to stitch it, but then he wasn’t sure it missed the tendon, so sent us to the ER and the on-call surgeon to be sure–it did), and it bled plenty all over the place, but still I think the little guy has a pretty decent immune system.
    My only allergic kid is the one who got antibiotics as an infant (the aforementioned ten-year-old) for pneumonia, which makes me want to see a big study on antibiotics before, say, the age of two, and incident of allergies, like the huge Danish study that just came out correlating severe autism and maternal use of acetaminophen during pregnancy.

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    1. I can no longer eat grains. I don’t have the celiac disease, at least it doesn’t show up in blood tests, but eating bread or anything like that more often than the occasional treat gives me diarrhea (and sometimes the treat can do the same, my tolerance seems to vary somewhat, only sure thing is that if I start eating those grains on a regular basis I will also have constant diarrhea, I have tried that often enough to be sure of it).

      I think the several courses of antibiotics I got in the late 90’s may have had something to do with this. I could eat bread just fine until then, but after those (for bronchitis, during about three or four years I got it after almost every cold, about three times a year – and that may have had something to do with the apartment I was living in then, which probably had mold) I developed that sensitivity to most normal grains. Yes, no actual proof, but seems likely anyway. I suppose I may have ended with a rather different gut bacteria after those years than I had before.

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      1. Could be the fiber. I have to try to eat about the same amount everyday because my system can get annoyed at anything out of whack.

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    2. Another piece of anectdata, when pregnant with my first, I couldn’t tolerate anything with milk. Made me nauseated every time. Eventually, I could do cheese and yogurt. Turns out this child was allergic to milk in any and all forms, started reacting at 4 months. Not diagnosed until age 2. Eventually, got less reactive but definitely not grown out of. Even had a massive flare-up of sensitivity because of some bad mold exposure recently. But it is settling down again.

      Child got antibiotics early because of skin infections due to the milk caused eczema. (Doesn’t normally manifest like that so the pediatrician had a hard time diagnosing what was happening.) Other than the allergies, she’s had the fewest other diseases.

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  10. I’ve seen this with my own kids. Their mother freaks out about everything and I mean eve-ry-thing. It’s crazy. I took my oldest to get a flu shot when she was my onliest. She was worried about the needle. Her mother was getting a flu shot that day too. Riley was ok until her mom started worrying about the needles. By the time we got to the front of the line (vaccine was in short supply that year, we had to go wait in line at the Health Department instead of handling it in five minutes in the doctor’s office.) my ex was in the bathroom and my daughter was freaking out. They showed my how to hold her. She looked up at me with tears in her eyes and… I stuck my tongue out at her. Problem solved. Kid laughed, nurse innoculated, ex came back from the bathroom.

    I sometimes wonder why people do this to their kids. I see it as being every bit as much child abuse as beating a kid. Think about it. What’s good about not preparing your kid to freaking function? I just don’t get it. There’s a reason I took my kids to the park without their mother when I was still married to her. It’s because they needed to learn how to NOT be babied. Failure to expose your kids to things is a parenting fail, flat out.

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    1. As somebody said, parenting is the last major field of unskilled labor – you’re always exposed to situations nobody trained you to handle. Minor “parenting fails” are to be expected. Main thing is, can you learn as you go?

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    2. Upon hearing a loud bonk as a child hit the floor, I looked over to see him watching me. I asked if he had hurt the floor, and stifled the laughter as I watched him anxiously check the floor for damage. He shook his head no, and went back to playing.

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      1. Kids don’t always have sense… my little Duchess branded the back of her leg on a heater bad enough to raise blisters, but apparently it didn’t hurt enough to stop playing. (Possibly because the only way she could’ve done that is if she was trying to climb up on the heater in a room she wasn’t supposed to be in, trying to get something she’s not allowed to touch…. not bad reasoning for a 14 month old.)

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      1. The title of the post was intended to be a play on keeping kids in a bubble warps them… but as it happens, bubbles (or a spell that looks like a bubble from the inside) are the primary mode of transport Underhill in my Pixie for Hire series.

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  12. I’m glad Charlotte and I just muddled through with Stephanie and Matthew. Stephanie was found eating a slug in the back yard, and Matt used to play with the mess in his diaper. (Sorry kids.) And we let them go out and play with minimal supervision from when they were very young, including letting them walk on their own at the mall (we were watching them closely from a distance so they could explore on their own. They are not allergic but have other medical conditions that are hereditary, but are happy.

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    1. Heck – my brother and I once decided to go through the garden and eat a bit of every plant there. No idea why we decided to do that, but it was to our good fortune that there was no oleander in it. I think that we had decided to pretend to be worms and bugs for the day – so we ate a bit of dirt, too. The soil around that place was mostly decomposed granite, which was kind of crunchy …
      I took a bite of soap, once too – which put me off cheap Swiss cheese for a good many years.

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      1. Oleander is a plant that does not belong in family yards. It’s really nice as a highway liner, though, since it does well in contaminated soils and actually helps cleanse the soil as it grows.

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        1. I can’t remember what the book was, but there was some great story about a nice old man who had a plant named something like “Creeping Death of Angels” that looked as poisonous as it was. After some time, one of the kids who would take care of it asked why on earth he had something like that in his lawn.

          Long story short, it was an excuse for a recitation of all the equally deadly flowers and shrubs down the road, starting with White Oleander.

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        2. I was rather amused and quietly croggled upon my first visit to my mother-by-relationship’s house, with the magnificent castor bean plants. Ricin is one of the most deadly plant poisons… and they are all around her yard.

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  13. I guess growing up deep-South rural has some advantages, but I’ve read several studies linking Type II Diabetes with an over-active immune system. Well, I have Type II Diabetes, and if anyone’s immune system has cause to be over-active, I guess mine does. I’ve been stung by scorpions (the big red kind, not the little brown ones found around rotten logs), just about every kind of bee or wasp that lives in Louisiana (a BUNCH!), ant stings, snake bites (both poisonous and non-venomous), exposed to poison ivy and poison oak on virtually a daily basis (we used to swing on the stuff, use it to build tree houses, etc.), spider bites, and on, and on. My parents grew up the same way, so didn’t make a big deal out of it. By the way, scorpion stings and hornet stings can be eased with a poultice of moistened tobacco — anything but snuff. Mosquitoes don’t bite me, and didn’t, even in Vietnam.

    Doesn’t mean I haven’t been sick. I’ve had pneumonia three or four times, and my left lung has scar tissue from it. I lost 35 pounds in Panama in five days to some kind of fever. I had something when I was about seven or eight that there’s only one other case like it that’s been reported — from a kid fifteen years younger than I am, when HE was seven or eight, and about twenty miles from where I lived. I currently have a sinus infection I can’t get rid of that I’ve had since we cleaned a cold room in our house in England (1987), While I’ve never broken a major bone, I’ve injured every single joint in my body, and have the osteoarthritis to prove it. The only allergy I know I have is to quinine, and that’s hereditary, from my mother’s side of the family. My youngest daughter is allergic to just about everything, and inherited it from her biological father, whom we knew. Timmy is allergic to a few things, including milk, and only gets rice milk, even at school.

    I do think we over-sanitize. I think some of the sanitizing agents are as much to blame for the sudden onslaught of allergies as over-cleanliness. I also think there’s a lot to medicine we don’t know yet! My hat’s off to Cedar — not only does she write good books, but maybe she can answer some of the questions.

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    1. ” By the way, scorpion stings and hornet stings can be eased with a poultice of moistened tobacco — anything but snuff. ”

      Copenhagen snuff works, used to use it on hornet stings before I quit chewing (never been stung by a scorpion). My grandmother always swore by bleach on bee stings, but I never thought it worked as good as simply slapping mud on it, and neither worked as good as tobacco.

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